Change of Time
by TamsinBailey
Summary: Booth and Brennan investigate a child's murder, and deal with the aftermath of talking about love. Set after the episode The Parts in the Sum of the Whole, and ignores almost everything afterwards.
1. Chapter 1

**Change of Time  
****By: **TamsinBailey

**Disclaimer:** This work is not for profit. No copyright infringement is intended. If you still find it necessary to sue me, you may now refer to the 0-2 column on the US military pay tables, however you will probably still laugh.

* * *

**Chapter 1**

Sam's body had stopped swinging a while ago. Hours, though she didn't know how many exactly. Long enough that the blood had stopped dripping, the wide trail down his face ending in a single congealed drop, stuck to the very top of his pale little head.

It bothered her, that drop. How it had stretched down towards the bucket each time Sam had hit the middle of his diminishing parabola. Gravid as a pregnant belly, but never quite ripe enough to overcome its own surface tension.

The first thing she would do, if she were in charge, would be to shake Sam. One sharp jostle.

She stared steadily at her son's head and idly wondered if this was madness. The gibbering was still there (_samsamsamnononosam),_ but now it had been muffled under a thick layer of calm. The future was short and inscribed. Why bother getting worked up?

He would come for her. She would do him as much damage as possible. Then she would die.

Simple as pumpkin pie. Sam loved pumpkin pie. She always let him have it with whipping cream. There were feet on the stairs.

* * *

The thing about the Atlantic Ocean was, it was made mostly out of water. Lots of water. Seventeen quadrillion gallons of heaving, corrosive, death water. Call me Ishmael, okay, fine. Whatever. Just don't call me stupid enough to get on a boat. Except he had. He _had_ been that stupid, and now it was too late. He was going to die under tons of cruel green water.

Should he scream defiance at the wave blotting out the sky? It was fitting for Booth men to go down using their last breath to defy whatever was smiting them. Trouble was, caustic environments were hard on the vocal chords. Hoarse defiance sounded so much like terror.

Behind him, a woman whooped as the bow of the boat shot upwards, the propellers shrieking agony as they spun air. Then the blades caught water again, and someone gave a deep rebel yell as the bow fulcrumed back down with a spine shuddering smash.

Booth waited to see if his stomach would crawl back down or just stay up, and marveled at the imperviousness of female vocal chords to salt water corrosion (boat captain's throats were for sure immune). Then the pervasive thrum of the engines cut out abruptly, and he went face first into the rubberized nylon bladder of reserve fuel strapped across the bow.

He added being blow sky high to the list of really crappy ways this day could end.

"Booth!" His partner's hand plucked at his shoulder, "are you okay?"

"Yeah, Bones," he levered himself upright. "Never better, see?" A drop of water rolled off his nose. Bones looked at him with obvious concern, but the captain's smile was a little more knowing.

"Looks like your boy is feeling a little sea sick there, ma'am."

She gave him a look of evaluation. "Are you feeling nauseous, Booth? You should have ridden in the stern. There would have been less motion. The transverse center of rotation of a deep-vee planing hull is much closer to the back end."

Booth wanted to ask how she could even know that, then he caught how Ahab was smiling at her. Like she was the cutest damn thing he ever had seen. Which made the question pretty unnecessary.

"The doctor is right. Go aft, young man." Ahab's smile was entirely different when redirected to his fellow male.

"I'll be fine. I'm not sick. I just don't like bouncing around." Ahab snorted, but Bones gave him another long second of appraisal before turning away to ask Bligh the Younger why they had stopped. He pointed to a patch of ocean about half a mile away.

"See that line there, where the water goes from blue to really blue? That's the edge of the gulf stream. The water here is nearly 80 degrees. Hot," he said, his eyes bold and really goddamn unsubtle, "but not too hot for action. Just the way I like it."

Bones looked startled, then maybe something that came close to pleased. Booth clapped his hands together sharply. "Okay! Lets get started then. Those fish, they aren't going to catch themselves."

They both look at him like they might have forgotten he was there, but Captain Casanova did start pulling out fishing rods. "Sure. This time of year the edge of the Gulf Stream has some really nice variety. Those birds over there, frigatebirds, are pretty good indicators of false albies and bluefins. Might even be some dolphins."

"What? Whoa!" Booth threw his hands out in a double stop. "Dolphins! You want to catch Flipper?"

"No, Booth. _Coryphaena hippurus, _also called Mahi-Mahi," Bones reassured him. "They're fish, not mammals."

He dropped his hands, trying for a smile. "Right. I knew that. Just a joke, hey?"

Ahab looked at him with the teflon expression of a service industry veteran. Bones just rolled her eyes.

God, he hated boats. Hated fish. Hated everything about this stupid day.

He should've refused, way back when Bones had first handed him those tickets. Except the excitement on her face had been way too endearing to crush. The light in her eyes as she rambled through the tortuous details of finding him the perfect present. Something she'd been pretty good about ever since the Jared incident.

He had gotten lost in how good it felt to be one of the few she made an effort for, only tuning back in when she said, "...got two, so you can take Catherine."

"What?" he fumbled, obviously behind the ball. "I'm not taking Catherine. These birthday things, they're for you and me."

Something spasmed across her face, new since the night of Goddamn Sweets' little book review. Alarm that wasn't quite fear. "But, you should take her. Women often respond favorably to hunting prowess in their mates," she told him with a worried little frown.

"Bones," he snapped, loosing his cool just a little. "I don't need a wingman in order to seal the deal." Which not only confused her, it also pissed her off, which had the side effect of shutting her up. Which meant he won by concession. So now here they were. Fishing.

Except this wasn't the same 0400 awfulness he remembered as a kid. It was still plenty early, but no sticky warm pop and smooshed PBJ, no blood suckers this far off shore, and Bones had paid God only knew how much to guarantee he actually caught something.

So once his line was in the water, and his ass was parked in a padded deck chair, Booth actually started to feel pretty good. The sun was hot, and the breeze cool, and Bones had spent the last hour ignoring Cap't Ahab in favor of rocking drowsily against his shoulder. Which was, of course, when it all went to hell.

* * *

Doing this on a weekend was definitely a calculated risk. By afternoon the park would be uncomfortably crowded. This early though, the trails were still mostly free of humans. It should be okay, as long as he avoided the creek.

He walked briskly, craning to survey the heavy summer flora, and the fauna it housed. Inconspicuous in nylon shorts and a backpack. Fifteen minutes up the trail. Then a quick look at the compass, and another 10 minutes vectoring away. He smiled when he ended up no more than 20 feet from the hole. He had earned an orienteering badge, once, a long time ago.

He tossed a small white bundle into the bottom of the hole. Pre-dug nearly two weeks earlier. Neither Tyvek, nor stainless steel burned well. The creek would take the metal, but the suit would float. Burial was the best way to dispose of both pieces at once.

Six minutes of effort later he used the entrenching tool to pat down the mound of filled in dirt. He was just about to press the sod back down when the rattle of rock falling on rock registered. Someone was climbing.

His heart spurted into brutal speed, adrenaline snapping his head towards the cliff edge. Tree cover wouldn't be enough to hide him if he ran. Staying here would give him enough time to stow the miniature shovel, but his hands were dirty, and his knees dark from ground in soil. It would be unusual. Memorable. He couldn't afford that.

A quick sprint put him approximately where the climber's head would crest the bluff. It turned out to be a boy. Young and wiry, with the light brown skin and epicanthic fold of asiatic descent. He reached down and pushed against the boy's chest. For one terrible second the kid's fingers clung to the rock like they were grown there. Then he was falling.

He paused just long enough to push the sod down, pressing with more force than strictly necessary. Calculated risk didn't guarantee a good outcome. It was ridiculous to be annoyed with probability.

* * *

Once they got there, the scene outside 1802 Fairview Ave was so typical it felt almost cliched. Yellow crime scene tape and the urgent red-blue-red flashing of police cruisers blocking the driveway. The ambulance sat on the sidelines, silent and abandoned.

Cam was standing on the edge of the front stoop, her arms crossed over her chest as she looked at the sky. Booth felt an uncomfortable curl in his stomach. Neither blood nor body parts could make Camille Saroyan, former New York City coroner, flutter a single perfectly mascaraed eyelash.

"Seeley," she said, which turned into a quickly damped flare of surprise, "and Dr. Brennan. I'm sorry, I thought I made it clear your services weren't needed."

The two woman looked at each other for a beat too long, then Bones nodded. "Yes, Cam. You were clear, but Booth and I were already together. It was faster for me to just come along."

Cam darted him an archly questioning look, but she aimed her missile towards Bones. "Already together?"

"Yes. Don't worry," she reassured in that tooth grindingly annoying way of hers, "I'm perfectly content to wait for developments until after the autopsy."

Cam's eyebrows rose upwards, and Booth decided it was a great time for a redirect. "What's with all the cruisers, Cam?"

Her lips pressed to a thin line, and he felt that same twist in his guts. She didn't answer, just turned so he would follow, and at first he couldn't see what had shaken her.

It was just a basement. Nicely finished, with sun streaming in through casement windows and a scattering of toys. No sewer stink, or avant-guard paintings made from bodily fluids. Until he realized the thing hanging from an exposed beam was a person. A child.

He recoiled. Then felt ashamed, cop that he was. Then he felt ashamed for being ashamed. He pressed his own lips together, and told himself to get a grip.

Cam motioned him over. There were plenty of people occupying the room. Crime scene investigators fussing with powders and glues, but no one else was interested in the boy's body. They stood in a little oasis of calm.

"Samuel Michael Klemm," Cam announced, crouching down to be level with the boy's head. "Six-years old, 117 cm, 21 kgs. Cause of death: exsanguination."

She twisted the boy's chin, until a hole in the side of his neck opened in a gape of flesh. "There's a hole through the right carotid artery. That means lots of blood, very fast. Especially in the inverted position. He would have been unconscious in 2 to 5 minutes. Dead from hypovolemic shock a minute or two after."

Booth looked down at his feet. Suddenly realizing that they should have been standing in a big square of missing carpeting. Cut out and carted off by some crime scene wank. Except there the carpet was, undisturbed. Cam pointed at something a few feet away, "It's in there."

Booth looked at the little orange beach bucket, and suddenly it was completely absurd that the boy was dead. It was just _stupid. _His blood hadn't been carelessly leaked away. It was right there, waiting to be poured back in. Except the circulatory system of six-year-old boys didn't acknowledge the concept of almost.

For want of a nail, the boy died.

"This is one cold bastard, Booth," Cam told him, rising to stand at his shoulder. "A punctured artery will spray blood incredible distances, but the crime scene guys turned up maybe two tablespoons. He had to have stood here, holding the bucket up. At least until the heart stopped pumping."

He looked at her, and for a second he could see the glacial valleys parenthood had scoured into her. How the weight had increase the sum total of her depth.

"Two to five minutes, watching this kid die," he said slowly, and she nodded. It perfectly underscored that little click - more than a feeling, less than a sound. This was a case he was going to solve.

()

He stuck around long enough for the body to be cut down and loaded into the quiet ambulance, then booked it to the hospital to interview the presumed mother of the boy. Cam spared him a thankful glance when he snagged Bones on the way out.

Heroic feelings were good and all, but cases were solved by facts. Which he was pretty damn short of right now. The direct fault of Charlie, who wan't answering his phone. All he knew was what the responding officers could tell him.

An anonymous caller had tipped the police to something funny going on in the house. No one had answered the door, but a look-see around the side had given the two officers a great view of a woman handcuffed to some pipes, and a very dead kid.

They had called their Lieutenant, who had called the Federal SWAT, who destroyed the door in the process of discovering there was no hostage holder inside. By that time the schooling reporters had rilled up the DC Metro's Police Commissioner's peptic ulcer. He punted the ball right back to the FBI, who double played it to Cam, who drilled it right across home plate to tag Special Agent Seeley Booth.

He didn't even know the woman's name, thanks to Charlie and his background research withholding ways. The man had better be nearly dead of something.

Bones watched him from the passenger seat, finally saying, "You seem upset. You and Cam. More than usual."

"Course we're upset, Bones. A kid got killed." He glanced at her, steeling for some kind of lecture about assigning false sanctity to a child's life. Instead she nodded and stayed quite all the way to the hospital.

The woman turned out to be Alexis Klemm, and he didn't need the uniform cop loitering nearby to know it was her. Poker faces only got you so far, and this woman looked exactly like she'd just watched her kid get strung up and bled out.

Booth felt his stomach tighten.

He knew that look. Seen the heat of Iraq bake it into the faces there, both light and dark. Seen it in the mirror, too. It sure as hell didn't help that Alexis Klemm surged up when he and Bones rounded the corner. Some wild hope for a thirteenth-hour miracle wrenching her out of the arms wrapped around her.

Their eyes locked, and he had just enough time to register how startlingly green they were, before final knowledge filled them and she jerked away. Tumbled back like he'd pithed her.

She moaned, curling away from the woman sitting with her. Lost in this new world where evil men and dead children turned out to be more than a campfire story.

He hunkered down on the edge of a plastic chair. Looming men would not be helpful just now. Behind him, Bones was a peripheral blur of tightly coiled tension, head pivoting between all three of them. He didn't really have time to figure out her issue, though. He needed to get this rolling, before the woman went into a full on fugue state, or something.

"Ms. Klemm," he started softly. "I'm so very sorry," but she wanted the words as much as she'd wanted those arms. Twisting her head another fraction of an inch away, reminding him suddenly of Parker at age two. Wrapped in a towel to contain the kicks as he violently protested the gooey pink antibiotics Booth was forcing past his clamped lips.

Thank God the kid only got those couple ear infections. Because the only thing worse than having to nightly overpower your bucking, twisting (and eerily silent) toddler, was realizing how easy it was to hold him down.

Booth suppressed an unhappy sigh. That analogy didn't actually work. Being force fed medicine had, no matter how perturbing, been for Parker's own good. Being forced to re-live terror and helplessness . . . that wasn't really on par.

Except for the part where he felt like a monster. That matched entirely.

"But we need to ask - " he picked back up, but didn't get very far.

The second woman had suddenly found her voice. Using her rejected arms to hoist off the high bed, thumping down in a solidly muscled way. "Now?" her voice had a low quality to it, head ducked down in unconscious posturing. "You're really going to try and do this now?"

Booth leaned back, meeting her blazing eyes with totally unmanufactured agony. "I understand how you feel, but we need to ask questions. We need to understand what happened."

Her face twisted, and he saw her use raw rage to force it straight. The hairs on his arms tried to rise. "No! Lexi was handcuffed to that pipe for three hours. Three hours! You do _not _get to waltz in here now, thinking you can ask questions."

He could see heads starting to turn in the corridor. Like negative ions, just beginning to quiver at the restive charge in the earth. And him the lightening rod in the middle.

He'd just started to hunch his shoulders against the torrent when Bones moved past him. Translating all that twitching into an almost spastic forward motion, stopping just in front of the woman.

The room crackled, and Booth felt himself click over into that sharp sight. Where everything was clear, and hard, and registered so fast. Bones' fingers closing around the woman's arm. The disbelieving snap and stretch of her eyes. The flare of her nostrils. The blood pumping so fast and so smooth through his muscles. Ready.

"Ms. Hadley," she said softly, and Booth knew surprise was being stored away for later. How she had learned that name was not important right now. Not with her standing so close and looking so steadily.

Everything was a weapon, if you wanted it bad enough. And Ms. Hadley (how!) wanted.

"Bones," he hissed, and she did look back, but only to hold out her hand in a clear Stay Back warning. Typical. He didn't stand up, but he didn't relax either.

"I'm Dr. Brennan," she said, turning back towards the woman, moving slow and easy. Which at least proved she wasn't totally oblivious. "Temperance. I'm an anthropologist, working with the FBI. I was in your house this afternoon, and I saw - " she hesitated, darting a glance his way before starting a new tack. "I saw all of Sam's things - his trains, and the drawings you hung on the refrigerator. I know that read him Good Night Moon every single night for months at a time.

"You love him," she said, and the simplicity of the words darted between his own ribs, "but please, he deserves justice. We all deserve that."

She stopped. Hand still on the woman's arm, just watching her face. Like Daniel in front of the Lion.

Booth felt himself holding his breath as the moment stretched out, thinner and thinner, until it had to snap. She had to snap. Then a low voice said, "Toby", and he nearly gasped as the rippling tension simply vanished. Dissipating into ozone as the woman wrenched out of Bones' grasp and spun back towards the bed.

"Lexi," she whispered, relief and anguish all tangled together inside the syllables. Ms. Klemm drug her gaze up slowly.

"He had a suit," she said. "The protective kind with booties, and a hood."

No one spoke, and she looked around a little wildly, locking onto him. "That's what you want, right?" she spat fiercely. "You want all the details, so you can go out and find justice. That's what you said."

Booth nodded rapidly, scrabbling for his notebook. "Yeah," he said, keeping his eyes trained on her. Seeing how hard her resolution had set. "That's exactly what we said."

"So, he had a suit," she repeated. "With booties and a hood."

"What else?" Booth prompted, and she swallowed.

"A ski mask." Closed her eyes and sucked in air. "And latex gloves." Snapped her eyes back open like the dark was terrifying. "I looked up, and he was just standing there. In the kitchen."

"What time?" Booth asked, but she'd slid back into the past.

"I thought, just for a second I thought he was a contractor or something. Looking for one of the neighbors' houses. But then Sam screamed, and I knew." Slow tears tracked down her face, and Toby Hadley (who fit in how?) moved close enough to touch her knee. She looked at the hand like it was unknowable, and said, "Just after breakfast. Sam and I were cleaning up."

"What happened then?" He asked it softly, making her lean in. Forcing her to narrow her focus down to his even voice.

"He grabbed Sam. By the arm."

"And then?"

"Injected him with something."

"What were you doing?"

"I tried to hit him. With the cutting board."

"Did you?"

"Yes, on the shoulder. He yelled and let go of Sam. But then he grabbed me. I tried to hit him again, but he grabbed my shirt. He pulled me down, and I don't remember . . . .

He reached for the next question, but she'd found her own momentum. "I woke up in the basement, handcuffed to the pipes. Sam was laying next to me and I thought . . . at first I thought he must be dead, but then I saw he was breathing."

She started to tremble. Her lips pressed against whatever was trying to rise up. Toby shuffled a few microns closer, and when she spoke the suppressed sobs were in her throat, thickening her voice. "I thought maybe he'd just left, but then I heard him on the steps. He came back down, and drug Sam away. Tied him to that beam.

"I tried . . . " She turned to the other woman, and Booth knew he'd lost her. It wasn't an interview anymore, it was a confession. "I told him he could have whatever he wanted. If he let Sam go I'd give him whatever he wanted. I wouldn't fight. But he just stared at me. I - I - I tried to pull out of the handcuffs, but h - h - he just pulled out a knife and it was too late. It was too late. He . . . Toby he . . . . "

"Shhh," Toby ran her hands down that agonally upturned face. Smoothing over the mucus and tears slicking it. Pressing their foreheads together. "Ssssh. I know. I know.

"You're done now," she told them in a deadly calm voice. Eyes closed as she rocked in time to the other woman's sobs. Booth stood and nodded, he and Bones leaving quietly.

"Something not quite right there," he told her as they walked back to the car.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know yet. But I'll find out."

She gave him a look for that one, obviously decided not to probe his idiosyncrasies. "We don't usually interview people who are so directly traumatized. You did very well."

He bumped her shoulder, giving her a sideways smile. "You didn't do so bad yourself there, Bones. How did you know that, anyways? About the book."

"Oh. Young children are notorious for demanding routine. One of the books in his bedroom showed a great deal more wear than the others. I - " she glanced at him quick, then away, "I made an assumption."

He played it nonchalant. "Hey, that's great. That's real investigative stuff. Parker was like that, you know. You have no idea how many times I've read Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie."

She looked at him carefully, to see if he was teasing, smiling when she decided he wasn't. Then she asked, "What now?", which reminded him of Rat Fink Charlie all over again. He glowered.

"Go to the Bureau, start pulling up backgrounds."

"You don't usually do that."

"Yeah well," he yanked his door open with more than necessary strength. "Times, they are a changing."

()

It seemed quiet in the car. Booth usually liked to chatter while they rode, filling the space up with his particular form of speculation and analysis. Or the upcoming Oriels vs. Nats game. Brennan found herself filling his tense silence by saying, "I'm sorry your fishing trip was interrupted."

He shrugged. "Nature of the beast, Bones. It's okay though, it was still a great birthday present."

"Yes," she agreed. "Still, maybe I could take you out to dinner? To make up for the deficit."

Finally, he smiled. Glancing over at her with a contentment she knew he was very bad at faking. "That's really nice, Bones, but you don't have to. My birthday is officially recognized."

"I know I don't have to. I want to," she told him. Didn't he know that?

"I'm going to dinner with Catherine." He blurted it out, like maybe it was embarrassing. Probably to him it was. He had a great many rules about what could and could not be talked about. Then there were the sub-rules that varied according to gender, religion, and probably other things she hadn't yet stumbled over.

She looked over at his closed off stance. Or maybe a dinner, a planned dinner, was too much like dating.

"Okay. Maybe some time later."

"Yeah. That'd be great," he said, looking punctiliously at the road, his hands at 10 and 2. The quiet came back, and when they pulled up to the lab entrance, she was relieved to get out.

"Hey, Bones," he called just before she had shut the door. She caught it, waiting for him.

"That really was something, what you did with Toby Hadley."

"Thanks, Booth," she said over the quiet whunk of the car door.

()

It was cool inside the lab, and quieter than on a weekday afternoon. Though the door to Autopsy was open, and she could hear activity from Hodgins' work area. She found Cam leaning over the downdraft table, still working on the external exam. She looked up when Brennan paused in the doorway.

"Dr. Brennan, hello. I'm afraid it's still going to be a little while."

"Are there some unusual particulates?" she asked, moving closer. The external part of an autopsy usually didn't take so long. Cam had already had over two hours with the body.

"Not that I've found. I just . . . I want to be thorough. Hodgins is over in bug land, sifting though what I collected. He'd know for sure, but it looked like regular body scrunge to me." She picked up a pair of calipers, thumbing the central screw with careful attention.

"Would you mind?" She jerked her chin towards the clipboard. "It keeps the papers from getting gooey."

Brennan picked up the clipboard, writing down the measurements Cam dictated. She let the white noise of the lab and the satisfying precision of three decimal places lull her. It was jarring when Cam replaced a string of numbers with: "What were you and Booth doing?"

"Oh," she stumbled, "I got Booth tickets to go deep-sea fishing for his birthday. We were out on the boat when he was called in."

Cam stopped measuring. "Fishing?"

"Yes."

"On the ocean?"

She wrinkled her brow, puzzled. "Yes. That's usually where deep-sea fishing happens."

"Booth hates fishing. Booth doesn't even like the ocean."

She gripped the pen tighter, like it could save her from feeling foolish. He had looked so pleased. "He didn't say that, when I gave him the tickets. He seemed to be having a good time." She didn't like the defensiveness creeping into her voice. It made Cam's eyes widen a little.

"Well, it's been awhile since he told me. I'm sure he's turned over a new leaf."

She didn't know what to say to that, which made Hodgins' arrival particularly timely.

"Hi, Dr. Brennan," he said, then shifted to Cam. "I sifted though all the crime scene particulates, and the stuff you found on the body. There was nothing unusual. Some gravel and pollen, and all the hairs match either the kid or the mom."

"What about the fingernail scrapings?"

He shook his head. "Dirt from the backyard. And wax. He had Sunset Orange Crayola crayon wax under his fingernails."

For a second, Cam just stood gripping the high lip of the table, head bent down and eyes clamped closed. "Damn it. I wanted it to be quick."

Brennan studied her, trying to think of what Booth would say in this sort of situation, when people needed bolstering. But nothing came, and then Hodgins said: "There'll be something. We'll catch him," and it was too late.

"When we interviewed her, Ms. Klemm said the man wore some kind of protective suit. With attached shoe coverings and a hood. We can surmise that's why there are no foreign particulates," she told them.

Cam nodded slowly. "I guess this isn't going to be one of those easy ones." Then she seemed to take herself in hand, picking up some swabs.

"These are from the wound on his neck. Why don't you go see if there's anything interesting."

Hodgins took them glumly. "Great. More Saturday afternoon particulates."

Cam gave his departing back a little head shake. "You can leave after that, Dr. Hodgins." He waved an acknowledging hand, and Cam looked back at her.

"He used to like being at the lab on Saturday. See how having extra-curricular activities makes you unhappy?"

Brennan was almost positive Cam was being ironic, but she could easily see how the statement was true. Plus, Angela's wedding was another thing she didn't really want to talk about. She put the clipboard down.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Saroyan. There's some paperwork I really should be attending to," but Cam cut her off before she could turn.

"Dr. Brennan, I'm sure Booth had a great time."

"He seemed to," she said, and made her escape. Her office felt familiar and soothing, and she let herself absorb it for a moment before opening a file.

After a while she heard Hodgins leaving, and vaguely remembered Cam poking her head around the door to say goodnight. Then it was just her, and the slowly setting lab.

()

"Hey, Bones!" His unexpected voice made her jump a little, and look at the clock. Five to ten.

Booth bounced enthusiastically through the door, and she let his presence, and all the ancillary implications about where he was not, sink into her.

"Look, I got you something." He held it out. She cocked her head at it's shine. Picked up it's little plastic weight and looked up at him.

"What's this for?"

"Because you did so well today. I figured you deserved an official FBI badge."

She looked it over. "It says Brandon."

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, well. I had to improvise. The gift shop doesn't exactly have any that say Brennan. And all the girls' names were on friendship bracelets. Now, can we please go? I'm in major need of some ice cream."

She doubted it. He must have come from dinner with Catherine, or maybe from drinks afterwards. She studied the little silver shield in her hand. "Cam says you don't like to fish."

She hadn't exactly meant to say that. And now that she had, she had no desire to look up. There had already been too many awkward silences today.

"I like everything you give me, Bones," he told her, and when she did look, his face was filled with honesty. She stood.

"Okay, but I'd rather have a beer."

He smiled, pleased with her capitulation, and maybe with her consistency. "Yeah, Bones. I know. We'll go to the Founding Fathers, okay? So you can indulge your alcoholism, and I can have some damn ice cream."

Except when they got to the bar she had wine and he had beer. She played with the plastic badge as he told her about Parker's sudden and overwhelming need to learn karate.

He leaned in a little closer, like they were sharing a secret. "I think there might be a girl involved."

It felt good to be sitting next to him. Normal. How long had it been since things felt normal between them?

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" she said, and laughed at his comically exaggerated look of pride.

"Hell yeah. The boy's a chip off the old block."

She laughed again, shaking her head, and her contentment must have come through because his smile softened somehow, becoming more about her. He bumped her shoulder gently. Grinning.

"As long as he hasn't inherited your propensity for ending up in the hospital," she grudged.

"Amen to that," he said, holding his beer bottle up and looking more serious. Her wine glass made a ringing chime against it. "Hey, amen to that."

* * *

A/N: Okay folks, as you've probably realized, this is going to be a multi-chapter fic. Which means an update disclaimer is needed.

This story is fully outlined, and I'm halfway through the rough draft. It's a priority in my life, but like everyone, I have major obligations. Like work, and, uh, work. Updates will come as quickly as possible, but I can't promise a specific day. It will just end in disappointment. (Right? Because _someone _had to have made it though that monster chapter. Right?)

If you liked this, drop me a line. I'd love it. Plus, my only other entertainment is making the Loran-C say, "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a LORAN factory", which means you should pity me. It's kind to write to the pitiful.


	2. Chapter 2

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 2**

The next morning came hard. His mouth felt furry despite last night's toothbrush, and somehow his eyeballs been replaced with sandpaper. Further down, his bladder was registering an urgent alarm.

None of this was fair. He'd had exactly four drinks last night, and now he felt like the aftermath of a four day bender. Correction; a twenty year-old's four day bender. That kind of stunt would probably kill him now. When had he become this person with bad knees and a low tolerance for alcohol?

He told himself to get a grip, but in the end it was the bladder situation and not a rush of self-actualization that heaved him out of bed. Bones would be in the lab today, because she didn't believe in weekends. Happily enough, neither did the United States Navy.

He had a shower, and a shave, and by the time Father Guiterez had made the final sign of the cross over the congregation he was actually feeling pretty good.

It had taken him nearly two hours yesterday (an hour and 50 minutes longer than it would've taken Charlie, who was still MIA - he was starting to worry the man really had died of something), ferreting though records both public and private before he'd declared victory.

The Navy Yard was quieter than it would be on Monday, but it was far from empty. It only took ten minutes to find the Marine Information School building. Inside was a front desk, equipped with a painfully young looking enlisted kid to do his bidding.

The guy exercised his adams apple a little, then scuttled across the open-concept office to tap a female Marine on the shoulder, pointing back to him. She was unhappy to see him. Kept it off her face though, looking at him with a _stay or go _sort of consideration. He cupped his hands together, then slowly opened his fingers, letting the imaginary water trickle out.

That got her moving, stalking right past him and out through the door. He followed, but she whirled on him as soon as he came through. Marine Captain October "Toby" Hadley, who looked riotously pissed. Having your career threatened tended to do that.

"What do you want!"

He made sure to keep himself relaxed. "I just want to talk."

"So you came _here_?"

He just shrugged. She stared at him, and then very visibly decided to retain her shit. "All right, you're here now. Let's get this over with. I was at Quantico on Saturday, running the obstacle course. You can check the logs."

"I'm not here to get your alibi, Toby," he told her. "I know you didn't hurt Sam and Alexis."

There. That had an effect. She turned away from him, pressing her lips white and bowing her head. "I could never hurt Sam," she said finally, her voice wavering just a little. "He's just a little boy. And Lexi..." she trailed off. Silent from habit.

"I know," he repeated, and gave her a second. When she looked back up her eyes shining, but the defensiveness was gone. He scanned across the ribbons on her chest.

"How long were you in Iraq?"

"Fourteen months," she wiped a rough hand over her eyes. "Four years ago. Sam was two. Lexi used to sent me videos of him once a month or so. Just every day stuff; him babbling away to a toy, or taking a bath." She swallowed hard. "I told everyone he was my nephew."

"It must be hard," he said, which made her look at him sharp, but there was nothing fake in his sympathy. Maybe with two men, but two women just didn't skeeze him out.

Toby shrugged, neither acknowledgment, nor complete dismissal. "It is what it is. I've never wanted to be anything besides a Marine." She seemed to rediscover her cigarette, taking a deep drag.

"Why are you here?"

"I wanted to talk to you. See if you've noticed anything unusual lately."

"Unusual like how?"

"Weird phone calls, strange people hanging around, general feelings of unease. Anything."

She considered it slowly, eyes flicking back across the past. "No. Nothing strange."

"You sure?"

She nodded, and he pulled out a card. "If you remember anything, you call me. Alright? Anything at all, even if you think its nothing."

She took it, and as her fingers closed on it she said, "You were in the service."

"Army. Rangers."

She snorted. "Ain't Ready to be A Marine Yet." The old derogatory acronym. He held his hands out in a helpless spread.

"Hey Devil Dog, at least it wasn't the Navy."

She glanced around what they could see of the Navy Yard, then gave the general assembly a sardonic huff. "Tell me about it. Fuckin' squids."

There was a little silence, then she turned back to him. "What do we do, Agent Booth?"

"Mourn," he said convincingly. Like he knew how to get through the death of an only son. "Talk to someone if you have to. Talk to each other. Try to keep loving each other."

She held his eyes for a long time, then looked away. Nodded. He left her sitting there on the bench, smoking another cigarette.

He drove to the lab. Or, at least, he really meant to drive to the lab. Started to drive that way. Except at the last stop light he turned right instead of left, and ended up in Silver Springs.

He sat for a good minute, idling at the curb and playing with driving off. Being a good boy. Then he flipped a parking placard onto the dash. Bones didn't want him; Catherine did. Time to accept reality. And since he was visiting honesty land, might as well admit that her wanting felt damn good. Like the sun on his face after too long in the dark.

He jerked the car door open fast so that he could feel the non-metaphorical sun on his face. It made the whole thing more concrete.

Inside the NOAA building a pimply college intern escorted him through a maze of offices and it wasn't until he was standing outside Catherine's doorway that he acknowledged this might be a very bad idea.

Showing up uninvited. After he had practically ditched her last night. Only it was too late for a tactical retreat. She was looking up. She seemed to be smiling.

"Seeley, this is a surprise."

"Hi Catherine. You're here, I mean I was hearby, _near_, nearby. I was nearby and I wondered if you wanted to eat. Lunch. You know, with me." God, who was the pimply kid now? He sounded like a moron.

For a second all she did was stare, and he felt his face start to heat under her inspection. Then she stood up and walked to him with the litheness of a stalking cat. Something to do with her hips, and the way her eyes never strayed from his. "Yes. I would like to eat. With you."

"Yeah?" He was smiling foolishly. He just couldn't do anything about it. Didn't really want to. She smiled back, just as wide.

"Yeah. Let me get my purse. There's a place nearby that has great food."

So he spent the ride and the meal and the conversation buzzing from a hyper-aware haze. Her hair. Her smile. Her eyes. Losing all thought of dead children and wounded lovers and missing goddamn researchers under the flick of her movement and the ripple of her low laugh.

Jesus, he wanted this. To drown under the court and spark between them. To feel her skin against his and to see how his hands looked spread across the paleness of her breasts.

He wanted this, and her, and every brush of her hand and slide of her eyes said she felt the same ache.

He paid for their meal, and while he signed the receipt she looked at him through the filter of her eyelashes in a way that detoured girlish and shot straight to sexy as hell. Shot other places also.

Then, with those same possessive cat eyes from earlier, she asked if he wanted to come see her place.

He only really got to see the hallway though, before she stopped short right in front of him. Pivoting around as he did a little crow hop to keep from slamming into her. Even with the evasive maneuvers, he ended up without any room for the holy ghost.

She pushed her hand down behind his belt, pulling him forward that last tiny bit. "Are you going to run away again?" Half teasing, a quarter serious, bringing up last night and his lame excuses.

He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her still for a kiss that involved a lot of tongue and teeth, feeling diffuse arousal honing into sharp desire. Pulling back to smile like a fool because he couldn't damn help it. "No. Definitely not."

"Good." She tipped her head to press a kiss into the soft part of his throat, then nipped the skin there. He sucked in a breath, sliding his hand into the dark weight of her hair, tilting her head back for another kiss.

She swung him around. Pushing him back and kissing him all the while, until the back of his legs met sudden resistance. Knees folding as he whumped ass first into the couch with a surprised woof.

"Just in case you change your mind, try to bolt," she told him when he looked up, standing close enough that he'd have to bowl her over in order to even get upright. He was grinning again.

"You'd take advantage of me?"

She raked her eyes down him. A leisurely swoop that spent quite a while at what he knew was a bulge at his crotch, before flicking back up to meet his own eyes boldly. Her smile was a wicked curve. "Today, tomorrow, and twice on Sunday boy-o."

"Today _is_ Sunday."

She put a foot up on the couch just outside his knee, eyebrows up and her fingers playing with the buttons of her shirt. He ran his hand up the inner seam of her jeans as far as he could reach. "Is it really?" she asked, all innocence.

"Uh huh."

A button popped free, and another, until the shirt hung open. Her bra was black lace, and he itched to run his palms along the silk of the cups. She pulled her leg out of his grasp and knelt down over his lap, the inside of her legs pressing against the outside of his own. Her face was very close to his. "Then it must be my lucky day."

He slid his hands across her shoulders again, feeling warm skin this time. Looked her straight in the eye, and said without a hint of flirting, "No. I think it's mine."

This close he saw it get to her. Her smile flicked, and just like that he was inside the shield of bravado people used to get through first time sex. He stroked a finger down her forehead and nose, stopping against the red of her lips. "I think that you're very beautiful, and I'm very lucky."

She pulled back and gave him long evaluation. "Well now," she said in a complicated tone - mostly wry, with a dash of pleased bemusement he thought, "you're something different, aren't you?"

"I like to think so," he said, giving her a good, solid smile. The one that would show her he really wasn't playing any games.

She cocked her head to the side, giving him the same long, steady look. Like she couldn't quite decide how seriously to take him. Without changing expression she ran her thumb slowly across his cheek, pushing her fingers into his hair and tilting his head back. He stayed passive under her hands, and when the kiss came it was softer than previous, but he could feel a deeper heat.

She leaned in to nip his earlobe. "I think this is going to be fun," she whispered into his ear. He pushed the shirt off her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor as he finally got his hands around those breasts.

She made a wordless sound of appreciation, arching into him as he squeezed gently, the crotch of her own jeans brushing across his erection.

"Yeah, fun," he said a little breathlessly. She smiled some, then she ground down hard, skimming his shirt off to lay a trail of kisses and nips up his collar bone.

"I do have a bedroom, you know," she told him, keeping up a steady rocking with her hips.

"Do you really?" He finally managed, sounding only mildly strained.

"Hmm," she said, unfolding with a grace that made him feel drunk and dizzy. Her hand was back behind his belt. Under the waistband of his pants this time. Underneath his underwear too. He felt himself twitch a little harder.

"Should we maybe go there?" he asked.

"I think so," she said, leading him to a room with mocha walls and a plush looking bed. Made him stand there as she unbuckled his belt and worked the zipper of his jeans.

"Briefs," she said, with a little eyebrow raise and an amused look. He shrugged.

"They're comfortable."

She laughed, low and sweet, and pushed him to the bed. Lying flat with his feet dangling down. He propped himself on his elbows as she pulled a foil packet from a bedside drawer and held it up.

"I get the pill. You get one of these," she said, like maybe she'd gotten an argument about it before. He sketched a salute.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Damn skippy," she told him sternly, climbing up to straddle him. Leaning down to kiss him deeply as she sheathed him. Then she rolled off, unbuttoning her own jeans, shucking them down her miles of legs.

They lay like that for long seconds, breathing, flat on their backs in nothing but their underwear. He reached for her hand, lacing their fingers together and pulling it over to kiss the back. Then the tender part of her wrist. Rolling to kiss the point of her shoulder, the flat, the side of her neck, the hinge of her jaw.

She watched him with heavy eyelids as he pulled the cup of her bra aside and brushed the nipple with his tongue. Head falling back as her fingers slid into his hair. He glided a hand down the plane of her stomach, dipping his fingers below the lace of her panties. She gasped and arched.

He smoothed and stroked, soothed and swirled, watching it play out on her face. The way she bit her lip to keep back a moan, and when she couldn't. The slide and pull of the muscles tensing under her skin. And it felt good. It felt _so good_. To be sharing this with someone. The body electric. God's gift.

Eventually she grabbed his wrist, though. Opened those charged green eyes. "This seems awfully one sided, doesn't it?"

He just gave her a guileless look and broke her grip, returning to his previous task. "No. I don't think so."

She just gave him a look. And pushed him over onto his back. Completely in charge, and unmistakably hot. Even better when she pulled his comfortable briefs right off. Then there was the wet heat of her mouth on him, her hand around the base of his shaft. Setting a rhythm there was no way he could keep his hips from joining. Unraveling. Losing himself in the blue electric thrill. Until it was his turn to pull her away.

"Catherine, wait." He was breathing fast, nearly panting, and her smile was cat-in-the-cream satisfaction.

"Yes?"

He rolled them - a quick flip of heat and her little yip of surprise, then with one long thrust he was inside; gasping at the liquid slide of her and using every ounce of willpower to keep still until she'd started to move.

She wrapped her legs around his thighs, tipping her hips up in encouragement, and he pulled back almost all the way before sliding in again. She groaned, hips arching to meet him thrust for thrust, head thrown back and her fingernails sunk into his shoulders as she strove towards release.

He pressed himself up on his hands and drank it all in, watching as she went still and stiff, back bowing up under his weight. She let out a low cry, and two more deep thrusts sent him tumbling after, head bowed down to her shoulder as the white heat licked deliciously over him.

Afterwards they lay together, her head on his shoulder as he used his palm to make broad strokes across her back. Breathing into the afternoon languor.

"That was nice," she finally said, and he could feel her smile against the skin of his chest. "More than nice."

"Yeah. It was," he told her softly, his own smile impossible to resist.

Silence again, then she propped her chin up on her fist and asked, "Were you really in the neighborhood?"

He blushed, which was answer enough. She laughed, looking a little embarrassed and a little pleased, and the husky, rich sound of it made a whole lot of stuff that had just a minute ago seriously sucked seem distant and bearable.

* * *

"Ha! I thought I'd find you here."

Here was Lim...Modular Skeletal Storage. The speaker was Angela. Standing dramatically in the doorway. Brennan put down the femur she had been examining, suppressing a sigh. So much for peace.

"Actually, I thought I'd find you out in the lab. Or your office. I checked the bathroom too. What are you doing down here?" She made a short survey of the body laid out. "WW I?"

"Suicide. Found hanging in Acadia National Forest in 2007. No identification."

"Wow. That's way too depressing for a Sunday." Angela gave the whole thing a general dismissal. "Come have lunch with me."

Brennan struggled to process. It was disorienting to shift so rapidly from the room's calm to her friend's dynamic presence. The words didn't come out the way they should have. "I already ate."

Angela deflated a little. "Booth's been here already."

When had all her friends and acquaintances decided she was incapable of remembering to eat?

"No, Ange. I brought lunch from home." She couldn't help but give the skeleton a quick glance of regret. The world held more important things, though. "But a break would be nice."

Angela brightened, and Brennan felt herself beginning to catch up to her enthusiasm. They hadn't had much time for each other, lately. It would be nice to re-connect.

Except by the time they found a table amongst the Sunday afternoon Diner crowd, their conversation had fallen back into the awkwardness that had felt so pervasive lately. Since she and Jack had announced their marriage. Since before that, maybe.

Brennan studied her friend, considering, then rejecting a discussion on the finer points of ruling out murder in strangulation cases. Across the table Angela looked distracted, or maybe just dreamy. Elbows resting on the tabletop with her coffee mug hovering in front of her face, her head turned to watch the streaming pedestrians.

Brennan bit her lip, feeling undeniably anxious. Then firmly told herself to stop. Just stop thinking a single comment, made months ago, had any real bearing on their friendship. Angela clearly wanted to be here.

Except she wasn't here. Not really. Not in the way Booth insisted was so important. With his theories on presence, and eye contact.

"Are you thinking about Hodgins?" she finally ventured, needing something to quell that thought. Given Angela's recent history, Hodgins was a logical guess, and if she was wrong, hopefully it would still prompt some kind of conversation.

"Hmmm? Oh, no." Angela finally looked back, putting her suspended mug down. "I was watching the light move across the building over there. Though, Jack _is_ a good thing to think about." Her smile was happy, with none of the sharp edge she used when Brennan had misstepped.

"You like being married?"

"Yeah," she said slowly, like the realization was new and surprising. "I really do. Of course, we're still in the honeymoon phase. Ask me again in two years and I'll probably tell you all about his smelly feet and the way he hogs the bed."

"Ange, you already complain about the odor of men's feet," but the other woman just flapped her hand in dismissal.

"I'm a free-spirited, bohemian artist chick, babe. Just go with it."

"Do you still want to have kids?"

"Oh yeah. Millions. Or none at all. It doesn't matter."

"I envy your ability to embrace the unknown." She'd told Booth the same thing, not very long ago. It was still true.

"It's not so hard, Brennan. You just accept that the future will hold good things, even though you don't know what they are yet."

"I can't - I can't believe in love the same way you do. I think promising someone forever is naive at best, but I recognize that loving Jack makes you very happy, and I want that for you." She realized she was watching her own hands fiddle with the coffee mug handle, and made herself meet Angela's eyes.

Her friend was giving her that look. Like she thought Brennan need to be taken in hand. "Alright, I admit I may be a little too much Grasshopper, but you, Bren, are way too much Ant."

Before she could even start to ask what insects had to do with anything, Angela plowed right on with a startling vehemence. "You think I don't want the same thing for you?"

"I'm happy, Ange."

"No, Sweetie, you're content. I'm talking about the kind of happiness that makes you stop in the middle of the street and smile like a fool just because you thought of someone's eyes, or the way they laugh."

"That sounds dangerous," she said, but it sounded disingenuous even to her. So she let the silence grow, realizing this is probably where it had come from in the first place. How silly, how particularly naive to have blamed it on a pig.

"What's going on, Bren?" Angela's voice was soft, and Brennan felt the empty hole where the energy to say 'nothing' should have been.

"I'm just... you know I'm not good with change," she said instead, hoping it would satisfy the line of questioning.

"What's changing?"

She didn't answer, wary of the depths the other woman could read into what seemed like simple words. Instead of pressing the issue, Angela just leaned forward to touch her forearm. It startled her, how deeply she wanted that touch.

"Look, Brennan. Whatever it is, you'll figure it out." Angela's words made a delicate pause, then decided to go on. "You both will."

Brennan watched the table, resisting the utterly childish urge to make Angela promise. Do you _promise_? She just nodded instead, forcing her shoulders straight and her eyes forward.

"I know," her tone implied Angela's hypothesis was a forgone conclusion. "I'll babysit, you know. When you have your kids."

Angela hesitated for a long beat, but in the end she took the bait - and wasn't that phrase alone the perfect metric of how much Booth had invaded her life.

"Yeah? Even if I have a gajillion?"

"Well, given _Homo sapiens_ 9-month gestational period, and two months of lactation amenorrhea, I think you'll max out at 16.3."

Angela had a sudden, and obviously overwhelming thought. "Oh my god. Have you ever imagined what 16 and one third kids might do to your boobs?"

The horror in her voice made Brennan smile, relieved to feel the intensity of the discussion drain away. "And the elasticity of the skin over your stomach. Are you reconsidering the number?"

"Reconsidering right down to zero."

"How does Hodgins feel about it?"

The curl of Angela's smile was fond, and exasperated, and there was something flicking at the edges that Brennan suspected was entirely private. "He wants whatever I want, God help him."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"It will drive him crazy. Even I don't know what I want five minutes from now, but he's going to try and anticipate me. He'll fail so badly, and so often, and it will be so endearing."

"And...that's a good thing?"

"Oh, yes. A very good thing."

Brennan rolled her eyes a little, and laughed, and remembered to just go with it.

* * *

A/N:Don't hurt me!


	3. Chapter 3

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

A/N: Well, gentle reader, what can I possibly tell you? I have now learned a valuable lesson on the difference between 'outlined' and 'done'. I apologize for the wait, and I hope you're still able to enjoy the story. It is now really, and truly complete. I'm posting in chapters as final proof-reading is accomplished, and satellite space allows.

Obviously the romance part is now completely AU, but I've had a few people read it over and they say the tale is still worth reading. As always, you will have to be the final judge.

* * *

**Chapter Three**

Sometimes it came down to luck.

"Booth."

The sound of his name made Booth look up to see that, Lo and Behold, Charlie had finally crawled out of the wood work. Or possibly the trash heap. Seriously, the guy looked like he hadn't slept in a week. Sagging, and grey, and sorry as hell. Like his last friend had just shot his dog.

Not quite, as it turned out.

Instead his son had taken a half gainer off some cliff somewhere. The pasty complexion came from spending the last 50 hours crouched over a hospital bed, stuck inside a parent's technicolored nightmare.

Not the worst one though; that example was laying in cold storage inside the Jeffersonian's Medico Legal lab. But definitely high up there, and now Charlie wanted Bones to come make it better.

"She's not some kind of parlor trick," Booth bit out, edging towards maybe a little offended.

Charlie didn't piss or moan though. He just stood there. Like a boulder of dough, absorbing anything that tried to shift it. "Something's wrong Booth. That fucking doctor..." he trailed off, a muscle jumping in his jaw. "What would you do?"

Yeah. Okay. If it was Parker, it wouldn't be his jaw jumping, it would be his hand around someone's throat. He sighed. "Why her? It's a big hospital, isn't there another doctor?"

"No!" Charlie had to swallow hard to get it back under control. "No, the other doctors won't contradict this guy. They swear nothing's wrong, but he just lays there. Christ, his fingers are turning blue. Even I can tell you there's something wrong."

Booth drummed his fingers, and Charlie pounced. "You had her in with you, when the doctors were carving into your brain. You were scared shitless, and she's the one you wanted to keep the doctors honest. This is my _child_, Booth."

Even now, distracted from having to fight back an image of his own son in a hospital bed, the irony, or whatever, got in and stung deep. Yeah, she's the one he wants all right.

He folded, taking his no-longer-AWOL colleague to the Jeffersonian and escorting him onto the forensic platform, where Bones stood studying some bit of something. She looked up at their arrival, eyes distant and not really registering. Then she refocused, and made a valiant effort.

"Booth. And...John?"

"Charlie, Bones. You remember; my fact guy."

She made a not very subtle 'ohhhh' face, and Booth rushed to cut her off before she said something about how pissed he'd been. "His son's in the hospital with some broken bones, and we were wondering if you could, you know, go take a look."

She wrinkled her brow. "What? Why?"

"Just as a favor," he wheedled.

She gave them an irritated look. "How could I possibly help? Living bone and dead bone are very different, Booth. Besides," she spoke towards the skull she was working on, "I'm a doctor of philosophy, not a medical doctor."

"Yeah, but you're a genius." Charlie broke in, obviously deciding he could fend for himself, and using exactly the wrong words to do it. Their eyes found each other, and darted away.

Charlie went on, oblivious. "There's something wrong with his arm. How it's set, or something. He's in a lot of pain. More than when he broke his leg, and his fingers are turning blue."

"Fast or slow?" she asked, poking some long metal thing into an eye socket.

"Slow."

"That could mean capillary strangulation. Has his doctor made a window in his cast?" She glanced at their uncomprehending looks. "Cut a hole into it, to look for infection."

"No," Charlie got out through clenched teeth, looking murderous and wildly hopeful at the same time. "No window. No looking. Please, Dr. Brennan. Please. Will you come take a look?"

She looked at them, her jaw jutting to the side, the way it did when she was deciding something. Then she put the probe thing down. "Okay. I can't guarantee I'll be able to do anything, but I will take a look."

She kept giving Booth sidelong looks the entire ride over, like she knew what he'd been up to, but Charlie in the back seat kept her quiet. He was kind of grateful for that. This thing with Catherine still felt a little too knobby kneed and unsteady to sustain another round of making love versus biological imperative. Especially with her.

As usual, the kid's hospital room was painted an incongruous bright yellow, with a giant Pigglet holding a bunch of balloons. The light was low and the curtains drawn, the murky light half hiding a woman sitting in the reclining chair.

Charlie kissed her on the temple, and Booth realized he had met her a few times. At some social function or other. Pretty, in the petit way of Asian women. Laurie, or maybe Leslie?

Either way, she had their son in her lap and it was easy to see that things weren't right. The little guy was sprawled across his mother's lap, limp in a way even exhausted kids didn't get.

"Doctor Brennan; this is my wife Lucy and my son Tau."

Bones took one look at that rag-doll kid, and knelt down to be on level with him, her lips pressed into a narrow line.

"Hi Tau. Is it okay if I take a look at your arm?"

He started to cry. Flat, jerking whimpers that made Booth's stomach clench. Lucy looked a little freaked out herself, but Charlie squeezed her shoulder, nodding when Bones looked up for permission.

She pulled his arm from around his mother's neck, where it had been hooked to keep it elevated. The cast went from almost his shoulder all the way to his fingers, the elbow set at 90 degrees. When she touched it, Tau notched it up to a steady droning whine and Lucy started to cry.

"What's wrong with him?"

Bones ran her hands gently along the cast, pressing her palm against it in a couple places. When she flexed his fingers, Tau screamed.

Not some little kid protest. He screamed like torture, and Booth swallowed against sudden nausea. _The sound of the wire-rope on flesh and_ - he censored the thought before it could really take hold.

"When he broke it, were there bones sticking out here?" Brennan demanded, like the kid's parents weren't white and trying not to puke, pointing to the part of the cast she had felt earlier.

Charlie nodded. She put the kids arm back around Lucy's neck.

"He has Compartments Syndrome - the blood flow to his arm is seriously compromised due to swelling inside the cast. Probably from infection. It's warm, where I was pressing." She stood, looking utterly pissed.

"His tendons -" she cut herself off, pulling a pen from her pocket and scrawling a hasty name on a scrap of paper. "I'm going to call Dr. Schrader for you. She's the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Pediatric Orthopedist. She'll do a better job."

Charlie took the paper, looking like he was considering a Hammuraib like idea of justice. Something like a missing arm in exchange for a badly set one, and Booth started to pull him aside for a quiet word about not doing any good from a prison cell.

He was distracted by Bones though. Fidgeting and chewing on her lip, clearly wavering between two decisions. Booth had just enough time to feel a trickle of foreboding before she opened that mouth of hers.

"Did you see Tau fall?" she asked. Charlie drug himself back to the here and now with an effort.

"What? No. I found him at the base of the cliff. He's forever climbing up stuff."

She darted a look at Booth. "He has impact bruises on his back, and his arm could only break like that if he fell onto it backwards. All the evidence suggests he fell almost flat on his back, but he has a bruise on his chest as well."

They all pause to look where she pointed. Indeed, there was a bruise on the boy's chest. It looked kinda like a -

"Is that a handprint?" Lucy asked, her voice gaining altitude fast. All available eyes shifted to Charlie, who was turning a sort of purple color.

Which was how they ended up looking for footprints at the top of the bluff in Greenbriar State Park. Which was how they found the body.

See. Luck.

()

It wasn't that Brennan wanted there to be another dead child. Another dead anyone, for that matter.

It was just frustrating, to have no purpose beyond taking dictation for Cam. So the little spurt of excitement when she saw the depressed oblong in the loamy duff, it wasn't satisfaction that someone was dead.

She had no reason to feel guilty. Still, when the careful shovels finally unearthed a ribcage much to small to be an adults, she felt something sharper than sorrow.

"What is that; four feet down?" Booth asked, crouching at the edge to peer down. "It's more like a grave than a body dump. Any chance this is old?"

"Are you trying to ask if the corpse predates body disposal ordinances?" She craned up at him. He made a face back.

"Yeah, Bones. That's exactly what I'm asking."

She didn't bother answering, pushing a thumb into the pubic symphsis instead; craggy and rough, and the epiphyses were years from fusing. "Young. Between 9- and 12-years old. She was buried here shortly after death, I'd say 12 to 24 months ago."

Booth blew out some air. "So, not a historical burial."

Brennan shook her head, pushing small stakes into the ground.

"She?" Booth's face was a grim.

"I'm basing that on the long hair," she warned. "You can't tell sex from a pelvis until after puberty."

"Sure."

She tied strings to the stakes, making a grid of small boxes.

"FBI could do that," Booth said diffidently.

"Hodgins would have a fit," she told him, laying down paper rulers. He grunted. She scooped some soil into a sample jar, labeled it, and snapped a photo. Moved over by one box.

"You want some coffee?"

She ignored him, checking that a set of rulers was truly orthogonal. It was. Scoop, label, photo; next. She let the work fill her mind, only looking up when the last box was sampled.

Booth sat a the edge of the pit. Above them the sun slanted through the leaves at a significantly different angle.

"Done?"

She nodded, feeling an ominous creaking in her left knee, and an ache across her lower back. Feeling dislocated and vague as well. "You can box everything up now."

Booth stood and whistled shrilly towards a group of technicians clustered around a truck, then he stuck a hand back down for her. She took it, and his strong grasp made the world seem solid again.

"Upsy daisy," he grunted as he hauled her bodily from the pit.

"You'll hurt your back," she informed him, swiping ineffectually at the dirt ground into the knees of her coveralls. It was hopeless though. She needed to be hosed down.

"Nah, Bones. You weight about two pounds."

She gave up on the brushing, intending to tell him it was angle, and not weight that was the causal factor in most back injuries, but he waved her off before she could start.

"Yeah, yeah. I know. You have a perfectly normal Body Mass Index, blah, blah, blah. I'm being careful, alright." She glanced sideways, to see if he was irritated, but he didn't seem to be.

"All right," she conceded, and after a quick pause to weigh if she should or not, added, "I am hungry, though."

"Yeah?" He looked encouraged. "Well, we better get you fed, then. Nothing more dangerous than a hungry squint."

She peeled out of the coveralls, letting her hair back down, and they went to the Diner. Where he failed to consume the cheeseburger and french fries he'd ordered. Poking the food around the plate instead.

"Are you okay, Booth?"

He grimaced, clearly upset about something. "Too many kids lately, Bones."

She took a french fry and chewed slowly, considering. "Isn't it better this way, though?"

He looked skeptical. She gathered her argument. "I mean, it's undeniably hard discovering murdered children, but if we hadn't gone up there, hadn't found her, she'd still be dead. Only she'd be dead and unknown. At least this way she gets her name back, and we get to catch her murder."

"It's not that I didn't want to find her, Bones. It's that I wish she hadn't been there to find. She should be somewhere playing with ponies, not lying dead in the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal lab."

"I know that," she said softy, "but she _is _dead. We can't change that."

"But we can catch her murder, right? Catch him, and shove him someplace where he'll never see a kid again." An unusual thread of defeat interwove his voice. Like that was exactly what they were _not_ going to do.

"Just as soon as I can examine the bones," she reassured him.

That made him smile, still tired, but not so dejected. "You're sounding pretty confident there, Bones."

"Of course," she said, not really understanding why she shouldn't. "We have a very good field record."

"Track record," he corrected lightly, but went right back to looking troubled. "You sure you want to work this one, Bones? We've already got the Klemm boy's case, and this one, it's gonna be nasty."

"What do you mean?"

"Buried that deep, with her hands crossed over her chest like that. It means the killer cared for the victim."

She gave him a look. "You sound like Sweets."

"Yeah, well. In this case Sweets is probably right."

"You think a family member killed her, and then felt remorseful enough to give her a semi-ritualistic burial?"

"Yeah," said with the same heavy reluctance "or . . . ."

"A pedophile." She finished for him, getting it.

He nodded. She looked down at the table. She had felt excited, when the telltale depression really did turn out to be a grave.

"We could pass this one off, Bones. We've got a case already. No one would question it."

Maybe she needed nasty, though. As a reminder. Or an apology. Booth would be better at the symbology. "No."

"Okay," he sighed, not sounding very surprised, picking up his burger and shoving a great deal of it into mouth, "but right now I gotta go."

She just nodded. His mouth was too full to answer questions about why and where, and there was a high probability she didn't want to know anyway.

She walked back to the lab, and spent the trip wondering if she was being unfair. Yes, there were two bodies, but with no reason to skeletonize the Klemm boy, she and Cam would actually be splitting the work load. Booth was the one who would be doubly burdened.

Also doubly invested in working with her, at the exact time he probably wanted to be less so.

The lab was taking on it's early evening hush by the time she got back, though Cam was still present and accounted for. Trapped against a desk and signing papers being enthusiastically brandished by some lackey. Brennan's movement must have caught her eye, because she looked up, pointing significantly towards the platform.

A heavy duty cardboard box had been placed on one of the light tables.

Brennan waved acknowledgement, retrieving her lab coat before pulling off the lid. If she finished a preliminary exam of the skeleton tonight, Booth could probably find identity tomorrow.

She worked carefully. The larger joints were still intact, but this far into butyric fermentation the smaller bones had disarticulated. Each one had to be inventoried and placed anatomically.

She was laying out the lumbar spine when Cam mounted the platform, coming to stand quietly by her elbow.

"Another kid?"

"Yes, buried in Greenbriar State Park."

Cam pulled on a pair of gloves, tilting the skull and picking up the lower jaw to examine the teeth. "Caucasian. Ten-, maybe eleven-years old. Right?"

"Yes, very good Dr. Saroyan." She hesitated for a moment before taking the risk. "I have an opening for a forensic assistant, if you'd care to apply."

Cam looked amused as she put the jaw down, and Brennan felt inordinately pleased. She didn't often manage to pull off irony. At least, not on purpose.

"Just make sure you go home sometime today, Dr. Brennan," the other woman told her with an indulgent smile.

"Of course," she agreed, but a glance at the clock when she walked through her apartment door made her a liar. It was five past midnight. Over ten hours since they found the body, and he hadn't called. For case details, or for any other reason.

She supposed silence was as acceptable a definition of moving on as anything.


	4. Chapter 4

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter Four**

Booth made it to the Hoover before traffic, and felt superior. It lasted ten minutes, during which he made coffee and investigated the possibility of donuts.

The premises proved to be entirely donut-free, which made him exactly the right level of disgruntled to sit down and read his email. The first in the queue was something from Bones. Timestamped 2317, EDT.

The victim from the grave _was_ a girl. Ten-year old caucasian female, brown hair, 139 cm tall, healed fracture on the right clavicle, another on the right wrist. No other unusual or identifying marks.

All Bones' findings neatly laid out, using bite-sized words he could understand. Booth stared at the far wall, bouncing a pen on his thumb and wondering what he thought about that. Another dead girl, in a long string of dead girls. Nothing all that special about her. Except Bones had emailed, instead of calling.

What he felt was: this needed donuts. Wasn't to be, though. When he looked up, Sweets was standing about an inch in front of his desk, staring. It startled the crap out of him. So did the hot coffee that sluiced across his lap.

"Sweets! Where the hell did you come from?" he yelped, frantically pulling steaming fabric away from his nuts.

"Wow," the kid's eyebrows had slid halfway up his forehead, "where were you? Cause it sure wasn't here."

Booth glared, pants still pinched between thumb and finger, and the look on his face must have made an impression because Sweets smile died.

"Oh, I, uh, I just wanted to stop by, see if you needed my help with anything."

Booth had plenty of things to say to that, but none of them were nice, and for once he took the advice. He let go of his now cool pants, ignoring the clammy fabric as he brushed past Sweets. Walking out into the bullpen, and over to Charlie's chair.

Sweets, who apparently couldn't catch a clue-by-four in the face, followed him.

"I understand that you're mad at me, Agent Booth, but walking away won't really help us resolve anything," he spouted in maddeningly calm voice.

"It will help me not throttle you," Booth shot back, stabbing Charlie's computer to life. A hurt look flashed across Sweets face, and against his will he stared to feel a little guilty.

"Look," he relented. "You can read over the file, okay? It's on my desk; labeled Klemm. Just, go away for a little while, alright?"

Sweets looked like he wanted to talk a little more on the subject, but wisely just nodded. "Okay, but eventually we're going to have to talk about why you're so angry with me."

"Sure," he muttered. Sometime. Maybe next century. Sweets gave him a look dripping with skepticism, but he did walk away. Leaving Booth's excuse about the icons on Charlie's computer being easier to navigate mercifully unaired.

It was true, but those things never came out sounding the way they should. Booth sighed, and called up the Tri-State Missing and Exploited Children database.

Two hours later he was striding into the Jeffersonian, holding a Russian Roulette game of case files. One live round, five blanks. Six parents who didn't even know what stakes were being placed.

Happy freaking Tuesday.

"Bo-ones!" he, well, he basically yodeled his partners name, standing outside the glass fishbowl of her office. Assorted minions glanced up and smirked, but she just looked mildly peeved, pressing the phone headset closer to her ear.

He rolled his eyes in a dramatic fashion, and she held a finger up. Not the middle one, though, so he loitered the requested minute, then wandered over to Hodgins' work station.

The guy was muttering to himself. Darting glances between some kind of microscope, and his lab book, looking spun up about something.

"Man, you ever wake up and just know the entire day is gonna suck?" Hodgins spared his arrival a sidelong glance, leaning forward to adjust the microscope's focus.

Booth smirked. "That's what happens when you get married. Trouble in paradise already?"

"Worse - a temperamental machine."

Right on cue, the box across from them beeped, printing out a report that Hodgins snatched up like gold, scanning rapidly across a false horizon of peaks and valleys. "Damn," he mumbled, looking mournful. "Third time isn't the charm. I'm gonna have to call the company."

Booth must've failed to adequately sympathize, because his shoulders hunched in defensively. "Hey, have you ever tried to troubleshoot sensitive electronics over the phone? It's like having your soul sucked out through your nostril."

"Better than another Maytag Man Incident," Booth pointed out, which earned him a grudging little snort of laughter.

Burned people smell bad. Cooked people smell good. A distinction the HVAC repair man realized too late. Turning eight shades of pale before bolting for the bathroom. Made it too, but only if you count the women's.

"Yeah, we don't want that." Then Hodgins actually focused on Booth for the first time, wrinkling his nose up. "Also, why do you smell like coffee?"

"You also have powdered sugar on your tie," Bones voice announced from a surprisingly close distance. He jumped like the worm inside the bean for the second time this morning, snapping around to glare at his partner. She blinked back at him.

"What?"

"Bones! Jeeze, what is wrong with you people? Try to make some noise next time."

She just gave him a perplexed look, like he was being completely unfathomable, nodding towards the files in his hand. "Are those the matches?"

"Yeah. Six matches in age, race, height, and weight." He handed them over. She spread the files on a nearby work bench, her face falling into that expression of remote concentration she wore so well.

When all her awkwardness fell away, and the raw force of her intelligence blazed like a lucifer. It sparked into the tinder of his chest and made it ache with want. Heart thudding along as he came undone. Shit, not today. He couldn't.

With effort he drug his eyes away, resettling on Hodgins. Poking buttons as he stood with a phone clamped against his shoulder. Less than five minutes in, and the guy already looked ready to burst a gasket.

"These two," she finally called his attention back, sliding the folders she had picked out back towards him.

"Okay, I'll get the medical records."

"Do you have time for coffee?" Her eyes flicked over him, then away, like she had risked something by asking. Temperance Brennan, braving the sargasso of human emotion in order to share his french fries and tell him about her day so far.

A hell of a lot more than most people got, and enough for him. He would make it be enough. He smiled. "Yeah, Bones. That'd be great."

So they got coffee. Sitting on a bench on the Mall while tourists frothed and boiled around them, telling her about visiting October Hadley at the Navy Yard.

"You threatened her? Booth, that's ... that's really mean." But there was just a hint of laughter in her voice.

"I wouldn't've actually done it."

"She didn't know that."

"Whatever. It worked. I liked her, though. I hope they make it."

"That her relationship with Alexis Klemm withstands the death of their son?"

"Yeah."

"Statistically speaking, they stand a very poor chance. Traditional couples, with access to a supportive community suffer from a 73% divorce rate. Their necessary subterfuge no doubt increases that probability."

He stretched an arm out along the top of the bench, twisting until he was more facing her than he was facing away. "Alright, Dr Doom, but, anyone who wades through that much shit in order to voluntarily serve their country has to be pretty tough. Pretty dedicated."

"Like you," she said, with that casual tone that always made him reel. Like she was repeating some undeniable fact about the sky being blue.

"Thanks, Bones," he told her, getting a puzzled look in return.

"For what?"

"Just thanks."

She snorted a little. Rolling her eyes like he was too incomprehensible to be believed, but she didn't say anything, which meant she understood.

They sat for a minute, Bones scuffing her foot rhythmically through the dirt, and despite all the crap between them, Booth felt the weak sunshine relaxing through him, his sleeve wicking against Bones' as they sipped. Brushing away dead children and psychologists.

He almost jumped when his phone chirped, telling him the medical records had been dropped at the Jeffersoninan. They went back, and Bones took about 12 seconds to hand him one of them. A dark haired, smiling girl; Dana Marquez. Booth felt the calmness of the bench slipping away.

She had been alive, and now she wasn't. He was going to _find _this son of a bitch.

"Booth?" Cam's voice. He hadn't seen her walk up, but now she and Brennan were both looking at him, waiting. He let some air out his nose.

"Yeah, good. You squints do your thing, we'll get started on this." But his escape was foiled by Hodgins. Appearing on the platform like magic, looking incredibly freaked out.

"The machine wasn't broken," he told them, eyes wide and showing a lot of white. "I tried everything, and the samples kept coming back the same. Which made me think the machine was fucking up, but it wasn't. It totally wasn't._"_

As usual, they all stood there, blinking at the guy, but instead of sighing and rolling his eyes, he just stood there. Nostrils flaring as he breathed.

"Try again, Dr Hodgins," Cam told him, arms crossed.

"The samples were _exactly_ the same," he insisted. When comprehension didn't dawn he shoved a hand through his curly hair.

"Jesus people, the mass spec! Remember? I thought the computer was broken, because it kept returning the same results for different samples, but I've been through every diagnostic test in the book, and it nailed the control solution perfectly."

"What does that mean?" Booth asked in a very reasonable voice. The guy looked about ready to flip. Blowing like a horse, hair wild-man crazy as his eyes darted to watch implications only he could see.

"Hey," Booth snapped his fingers in the other guys face, "Focus. Tell us what that means, Hodgins."

"It means...uh...it means that the two samples I tested were the exact same substance."

Which didn't really help much. Worse, Bones seemed to have caught his St. Elmo's jive, her own eyes flaring wide.

"Which two," she said, a little too fast and a little to strident. "Dr. Hodgins, which two samples were you testing?"

"Samuel Klemm and the Jane Doe you found. They were the same," Hodgins told her, and even though he and Cam were still basically lost, Bones was breathing out this tiny little protest of shock and dismay.

"What's going on here, people?" Cam's arms were crossed against her chest, her voice carrying the snap of authority. Neither Bones nor Hodgins broke from each other.

"Are you completely sure?"

"Yes. I'm sure."

"Last warning, folks. Explain. Now." Cam's directive had that flatness that never failed to make Bones bristle.

"Dr. Hodgins is about to tell you that the same person, or at least the same substance, killed both victims." It wasn't Bones answering, though. It was Sweets. Joining their circle as if he'd been there all along. As if he belonged.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Booth demanded. Except that wasn't the right question. He knew because suddenly everyone's eyes were on him. Even crazy-guy Hodgins. "I mean, how do you know that?"

"Simple deductive reasoning," Sweets shrugged, which didn't really cover how excited he was. He held up the manila folder in his hand. "We know the Klemm boy was sedated with some kind of substance. Hodgins tested to find out what it was. Then he obviously found the same substance in another victim."

"You gave him the file?" Bones' voice was loud enough to bounce off all the steel and glass. "Booth! Why did you give him the file? We don't need him to help. He's very bad at helping."

Booth wasn't really going to deny that, but he didn't get a chance to agree either. Their little melodrama had drawn attention all across the lab, and now Angela had come to investigate. Coming to a stop behind Hodgins, her hand curling over his shoulder in a way that looked totally unconscious.

"What the hell is going on?" She gave them all a no-nonsense glare.

"Hodgins and Dr. Brennan found a serial killer." Cam said, sounding brittle with wryness.

"Must be Thursday," Angela said blandly, with a little smile. There was no way she didn't feel the tension under her hand, though. Her smile didn't last. "What's the story?"

Hodgins swallowed hard, still looking very not calm, but Angela gave his shoulder a squeeze and he stuttered into speech.

"I found Sodium thiopental when I ran the toxicology screen on Samuel Klemm's blood. It's a rapid onset anesthetic that causes unconsciousness in 30 to 45 seconds. I found the exact same, and I mean literally exactly the same substance when I ran Jane Doe's tox screen."

"Dana Marquez." Bones filled in the dead girl's name quietly. Hodgins nodded, solemn and pale.

"Dana Marquez, okay. She and Samuel Klemm had the same chemical in their systems' when they died."

"You're sure, Jack?" Angela repeated Bones' question, pulling him around to face her. He grabbed her wrist, pressing into the touch.

"Yeah, Ange, no doubt. It's the same drug. It gotta be the same lot number even, the samples are that close."

"Okay, see, how hard was that?" Booth said with an encouraging smile, looking around at the general assembly. It didn't lighten things up though, just made Angela look at him with an expression he'd never seen on her before.

"Back off Booth," she snapped, and he actually did take a step back. Angela's anger was always unexpected.

"Okay," he held out his hands to placate. "Okay. I'm just not sure why everyone is so worked up."

Angela looked at him like he was an unbelievable specimen. "In case you haven't noticed, we don't have a good track record with serial killers around here. Or maybe you've forgotten about Zach? Or when Jack and Brennan were buried alive. Or how about when you dropped Howard Epps off a balcony.

He swallowed, hard. Angela drew herself up for another salvo, but Bones called her off.

"Enough, Ange. He remembers."

Angela looked at Brennan, long and cool. Then she backed down. It didn't make the blue spark of ozone fade away, though. Bones simply transferred her stare to Sweets, two bright smudges of color staining her cheeks.

"And you're wrong, Sweets. Samuel Klemm died of a punctured carotid artery, and - and we don't know what Dana Marquez died of. You're _wrong_."

The vehemence made Cam blink and Angela stare. The artist was still holding onto Hodgins though, so Booth was the one to walk over and put a hand on her shoulder.

Big surprise, she resisted. "No, Booth, he's wrong."

"Yeah," he said, "he knows that. He knows, okay?"

She looked at him, eyes blazing and her lips skimmed back from her teeth. "He says things, but there're just words. They're not always right," she told him, her jaw defiant and her eyes pleading.

Across from them, Sweets just stood. Staring with his mouth practically open. Like he'd just realized that the toys he'd been playing with were actually people.

_Good, _Booth though, _good_. Giving the kid a glare of his own.

"Everyone," Cam patted the air soothingly. "We all need to calm down and remember that we're professionals."

"Yes, I think a some rational thought would be very refreshing right now." Bones said, back coming up straight as she shook his hand off and stepped away. Probably worried about how much she'd just reveled during that little tirade. Angela was definitely looking at her with suspicion.

So they all trouped up to the couches on the cat walk. Sweets coming up Tail End Charlie, looking contemplative.

"Okay, tell us about this Sodium theo-whatsit," Booth started.

"Sodium thiopental," Hodgins corrected, Angela's hand on his knee. "Like I said. It's a very fast acting depressive anesthetic. It's used in the inductive stage of anesthesia, also to induce medical comas."

"You found it in both victims."

"Yes. Plus, I called the hospital. They found it in the tox screen they did on Alexis Klemm."

"Any chance it could be a coincidence?" Cam asked, though it didn't sound like she held out much hope.

"No. The composition was too close. Both doses had to have been from the same lot. I'd bet one of my doctorates that they came from the same bottle."

"So, we have one guy who killed at least two kids in two different ways. That's the strangest serial killer I've ever heard of," Cam summed up, starting to get interested in the puzzle.

"No. We have three people, two of whom are dead, who were injected with the same substance." Bones, always Bones, clarified. Cam tipped her head in acknowledgement.

"Who uses this stuff?" Booth asked.

"Veterinarians," Hodgins told them. "Primarily small animal doctors."

"So we start checking out vets. See if there's any connection between the Marquez' and the Klemm's.

"What about the park?" Sweets asked, his voice still subdued.

Booth suppressed a sigh. He couldn't exactly pretend the kid wasn't there, but he sure wanted to. "What about it?"

"Someone didn't want Tau up there on the cliff. It'd be interesting to know why."

Which, as much as Booth didn't want it to be, was a pretty good point. "You think it was the killer? What, revisiting the grave?"

"Creepy," Angela muttered.

Sweets just nodded. "It's within the realm of possibilities."

"Okay, so. This is good." Booth clapped his hands together, trying to get movement into everyone. "I'll check into vets, and get some surveillance on that bluff. You guys find out exactly where that Sodium theopennant came from.

We work as a team Squint Squad, we catch the bad guy."

Sure, it made him sound like a hyperactive moron, but it worked. Everyone strode off with at least the idea of a purpose. Sweets gave him an almost pleading look, but Booth ignored him. Returning to the Bureau alone to file permission to surveil paperwork. Then he drove 20 minutes north.

"Hi," Catherine stood in her door way, limned in light and smiling a lot. A lot, a lot. "It's good to see you."

He smiled back. "Good to see you, too."

She used his tie to pull him in for a deep kiss. Tongue sliding wetly over his until he felt the first hint of desire sparking up. Then she broke away.

"That was cheesy," she told him, mirth showing thorough her serious eyes, hand still fisted around his tie. "Kissing me on the porch like that."

"Hey, you started it."

She laughed, and pressed her hips against his. "And later I'll finish it. Right now, I made steak. I do it about once a year, so you better enjoy it."

Which he did. Sitting at a dining room table like a civilized person, while she watched him with those amazing eyes and asked what he had done all day. It was hard though, trying to find an explanation that didn't loop and double back on itself.

The communal freak out wouldn't make much sense unless he told her about Zach. About Howard Epps, and Heather Taffet, and the torrent of fear that had boiled through him. Running through that damn quarry so Bones and Hodgins didn't die a nightmare death. Waking up inside a submarine, sunk at the bottom of a death trap. None of it was exactly dinnertime conversation.

Definitely couldn't tell her how Bones finally got mad at Sweets because, well, duh.

Finally he shrugged. "Same old, same old."

* * *

A/N: Opinions?


	5. Chapter 5

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 5**

She was proofreading finalized reports when Booth showed up the next morning. Appearing as a disembodied head hovering over her computer screen.

"Come on, Bones. Things to do," he told her cryptically, the smile on his face wider than she was accustom to seeing. She stilled her hands on the keyboard but didn't remove them, trying to understand what was going on.

"Did you just drop Parker off?" Nothing else she knew of could make him smile like that.

"What? No." He gave her an exasperated look, rounding the corner of her desk. "Dana Marquez' mom is gonna be here in ten minutes. So, come on."

He grabbed her upper arm, pulling with a gentle but irresistible traction. Steering her across the lab and visibly restraining himself from prodding her up the stairs to the lounge. Then he stood near the railing, surveying the height with a benevolent look and bouncing a little on his toes.

"You seem happy," she finally said, smiling at his antics. He gave her a sideways look, eyebrows tented up like he had a secret, and she realized suddenly that he was wearing the same pants and tie as yesterday. She looked away.

"What are we doing up here, anyway?" she demanded.

"Meeting Dana Marquez' mom," he said in a tone that implied she clearly knew that fact and was being annoying.

"No, why are we meeting the victim's mother up here? Usually we meet people at the Bureau."

"Oh," he turned fully towards her, the nearly boyish enthusiasm fading away as he rubbed the back of his neck. "Her kid's been missing for two years, Bones. The Bureau doesn't hold good memories for her. I thought coming here might be better."

She glanced across the wide open layout of the table and chairs. Modern society liked to keep death behind closed doors. "Wouldn't the conference room be better?"

"Nah," he looked out across the humming industry of the floor again. "I wanted her to come up here. To see the care everyone here gives the people who end up on the tables down there."

He nodded towards the light tables, and her eyes followed to pick out familiar forms without effort. Hodgins with his head bent to examine something with close attention. Angela cradling a skull in both hands, studying the arches and orbits with calm eyes. Cam was out of sight, but she could easily remember how her head had bowed down over the slivers of crayon wax under Samuel Klemm's fingernails.

Would that be a comfort? Looking out across a space filled with people busy keeping the silent dead company. She thought of her mother's bones, and turned back towards her partner's faintly creased face.

"Thats nice Booth," she said softly, and the anxiousness he was pretending didn't exist melted away.

"Yeah?" he asked, but anything more was cut off by the rattle of the catwalk. A security guard escorting a comfortable looking woman. Short, with thick, dark hair. Just heavy enough to be breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the stairs.

"Agent Booth?" she asked, and her partner nodded towards what he insisted on calling the rent-a-cop. The man reversed course, leaving the three of them.

"Yes, ma'am. This here is my parter, Doctor Temperance Brennan." Booth sat, and after a beat she and Ms. Marquez did the same.

"You found Dana," the woman told them. No hint of a question. Booth nodded, his eyes soft as he focused completely on her. Giving the impression he was listening not just with his ears, but somehow with his whole body.

"Yes, we did."

Ms. Marquez took a deep breath, fingers sinking metacarpal deep into the material of the purse she held on her lap. "Where?"

"Greenbriar State Park."

"How long?"

"Twenty months," Booth told her, and the woman flinched. Curling around a psychosomatic pain.

"We're very sorry for your loss," Booth murmured into the silence, but Ms. Marquez ignored him.

"Please, I need to know. What happened to her? Before she was . . . before she died."

"As far as we can tell, your daughter was injected with a lethal dose of a veterinary anesthetic."

She gave them a frantically puzzled look. "I don't understand. Dana was kidnapped by a car jacker. How - how would some meth-head get veterinary anesthetic?"

"We're looking into that, Ms. Marquez." Booth shifted his shoulders, the way they did when he was equivocating, and the woman's attention became suddenly sharp. Reading instinctually what had taken Brennan years of effort and mistakes to learn.

"Are you implying that my daughter was not accidentally kidnapped and later killed by a car jacker?"

Booth shifted again, torn between honesty and another family's confidentiality. "There's been another case with similar circumstances."

In front of them, Luz Marquez went rapidly white, her respirations, and very probably her heartbeat accelerating. "Another case? Why?"

Booth didn't understand the question, but Brennan did. In this one thing, she had the advantage. Studies had proven women feared rape over murder, and karate was more than just a way to stave off a sedentary life style.

"There was no sign of sexual assault," Brennan spoke for the first time.

"But, she's just - she just bones, right? After two years. . . ."

Brennan shot a glance at Booth, but he just gave her an encouraging face. "With children Dana's age, any penetrative sexual assault would leave marks on the bone." She forced herself to meet the woman's eyes steadily. "I spent several hours examining your daughter's remains - I can assure you there was no sign of sexual trauma."

Luz Marquez put a hand across her eyes and started crying. "Thank god," she said in a thick voice. "Oh, thank you God."

Her lips trembled, tears sliding from beneath the warding hand. When that hand finally dropped, it was Booth she wanted.

"I'm thanking a God I hate. What does that mean?"

"It means you're a mother," he told her simply, and her face, never steady, broke again.

"Was. I was a mother."

"No," he cut the thought off with low fierceness, and Luz took a great, gasping breath, tears running unchecked and unnoticed under the hypnosis of his conviction. "Are. You are a mother."

Brennan watched the lock of their eyes and thought _never in a million years_.The taunt Russ used to send her way, when she would ask if she go with when he made the rounds in his questionably intact car. The pool, the mall, the arcade.

Her gifts were undeniable: intelligence, talent, beauty, but never, not in a million years, would anyone add empathy to the list. That was his. The nearly alchemical ability to connect. Infants to octogenarians getting not just compassion, but his willingness to absorb their suffering and give it back as understanding.

If they tried to be together, how often would he reach out? How many times would he try to make that connection before he realized she was incapable of being what he wanted? His metaphorical hand would drop, and not long after his pain, would be his baffled anger.

Brennan found that she had to look away from him.

They sat in their triangle for a long moment, Ms. Marquez looking out across the lab, her eyes following some activity down there before she turned back to them. "I'd like to see my daughter."

"Ms. Marquez," Booth started to protest, but she forestalled him with just a hand.

"I don't get to take her and bury her, do I? I have to wait until you say it's okay?"

Booth looked pained, and murmured the woman's name again. Like the invocation could somehow help the situation. If it did, Ms. Marquez herself didn't seem to believe.

"No," she said, and the word snapped with finality. "There are a things in this life that I regret, Agent Booth. Failures so extreme I need a psychiatrist to keep the weight of them from driving me crazy, but I can tell you that walking out of here without seeing my daughter isn't going to be one of those regrets.

She may be nothing but bones, but she's still my daughter. If you want to keep her, then you are going to let me see her."

Brennan could feel her partner looking at her, probably hoping for solidarity, but there really wasn't any reason to bar the woman from viewing the remains. She nodded, and they all trouped down to the back room, where Dana Marquez' clean white bones had been laid out.

Luz Marquez faltered in the doorway, an animal whine rising from the back of her throat. She swallowed, once, twice, and Booth started to put a hand to her arm, but she moved away from him. Only stopping when her hips pressed into the edge of the table that held the remains of her daughter.

The pads of her fingers stroked across the frontal bone of her daughter's skull, and when Brennan opened her mouth to forbid the touch, Booth grabbed her wrist loosely, minutely shaking his head.

"I'm so sorry, honey. Sorry you never got to drive a car, or kiss a boy in the summer. Hell, kiss a girl if that's what you wanted. Sorry that I told you daddies weren't important, when you wanted one so bad. Sorrier that you could ever know that I didn't lock the goddam car doors. But you, baby girl, I was never sorry about you."

She pressed her lips next to where her fingers already rested, and when she stood back up, she looked sad but not haggard. Looking at them, at him, with sober eyes. "Thank you."

Booth nodded gravely, and the woman moved past them towards the doors. They watched her retreating back, and Brennan knew she wouldn't be able to hold the question back.

"How did you know?" she asked, relieved when her voice didn't hold any extra fervency. "How did you know that seeing the lab would be cathartic for her?"

"Just a guess," he shrugged the answer off.

"It was a good guess." The admiration she knew was in her voice made him turn, eyes creasing in the way that meant she had pleased him.

"Hey, it's past noon. You wanna go get some food?"

She thought about how happy he'd been this morning, bouncing despite his recycled pants and tie, and probably socks. _Because _of those self same things. Shirt a little wrinkled because it was the emergency one from the back of his truck.

That wasn't something she could give him. Not in the long term.

He'd kissed her, and inside the center of that heated collapse, she'd seen their future. Curving out as gravitational lensing from the pressure of his body against hers. Seen it, and slammed her hands against it. Shoving against the decades he thought he wanted.

She didn't believe in psychics, the future could not be read, but future events could be interpolated from previous occurrences. He wanted her to soften around the temper of his love, and she couldn't. She couldn't, and he, the ductile one, would end up warped. Changed. Because of her.

It couldn't be allowed.

"I've got paper work."

He sighed a little, clearly realizing that wasn't much of an excuse, but he didn't push it. "Okay, Bones. I'll see you later right?"

"Definitely," she gave him a smile, knowing it was true. He left, but before she truly got back to her neglected reports, she looked at the little plastic badge propped up against the base of her desk lamp.

Maybe Catherine could sustain that kind of happiness inside him, but finding out would take time. And space.

()

"Chri...meny, are you absolutely sure?"

From the other end of the phone, Charlie, the once again Ever Faithful said, "Yup."

Booth sighed. Deep, and long, and nearly trembling. In the passenger seat, he could see Parker's brow crinkling. He disconnected over the sound of Charlie's evil laughter, glancing at his son. "It's okay, Parks. Just some bad news from work."

"You almost cussed, Dad. Is someone dead?" An eager question. Dead things and poop held endless fascination for ten-year-old boys. A fact Rebecca, the product of an all girl upraising, found endlessly repellant. Assigning Booth the job of attending Parker's ballgames. Always a high density belt of ten-year-old boys.

Not that she'd had to twist his arm. Spending some weekday time with Parker wasn't something he was going to object to.

"No. I just found out I have a lot more work than I expected, that's all." About 217 more than he expected. Who knew there were so many christing veterinarians in DC?

Parker nodded sympathetically. "Mrs. Johanson gave us about a ton of homework last weekend. Brent helped me with it, but it still took forever. Science, math, _and _reading."

Booth gave him a smile, trying to suppress any undertones of amusement. "Yeah bub, that's rough, but homework's a necessary evil. It gets you good places."

Parker rolled his eyes. "I know that, Dad. Bones told me."

"She did, huh? Well, she's right."

"Yeah," Parker nodded firmly, like his partners veracity was something everyone knew, and was very obviously struck by a bolt of inspiration. "Hey, do you think we could maybe invite Bones to go to the zoo this weekend? I think she likes doing things with us, like that time at Six Flags."

He looked at the hope brimming on his kid's face, and said, "Maybe," but he didn't think so. Weekend outings probably weren't in the playbook anymore. Not under the new rules, where coffee was okay, but meals together seemed to be strictly forbidden.

Parker smiled. "Cool."

Booth dropped him off at Rebecca's, receiving a perfunctory hug and definitely no exuberant kiss on the cheek when it was time to say goodbye. Well, times changed, didn't they? Bones had told him that, too.

"See you Friday?" he asked, and Parker's head bobbed like a yo-yo.

"Don't forget to ask Bones, okay Dad. You won't forget?"

"No, I won't forget," he reassured, hiding any and all resignation for what he'd just gotten himself into. Rebecca was standing in the door now, and Parker went zooming towards her, broadcasting an all points bulletin about Willy Trenholm's super gushing skinned knee.

Over his head, they shared a grimace of affection and amazement. What was this thing they had made . . . ? Then Booth slid back into his truck, pointing its nose towards the Hoover.

He had about 300 veterinarians to follow up with.

* * *

Once upon a time, there had been a princess. Tall and fair, her knuckles grimed with paint and her legs clamped around the barrel of life. Hands and knees and hips riding it's wild plunging cataract. Slamming her heels in savagely when it stopped to heave and blow. All the texture and the color and light pouring into her, coming back out as broad strokes on canvas. No time for the dry dust of equations, no love for the oppressors who worked them.

Angela hit enter on her keyboard, and watched the code she'd typed into MatLab start to iterate. She'd told Brennan go along with her bohemian artist vibe, but was that even true anymore?

She looked briefly out into the lab, and saw the lab-coated figure of her husband. If it wasn't true, did she care?

"Ange?" a voice asked, and even though she hoped for Hodgins, it was Booth. Then, because she could, because he was easy, she curved a smile at him. Eyes flicking down then up, until she knew he was keeping back a blush through nothing but willpower. His expression changed from surprise, to bemusement, to something that may have been a little bit turned on, and Angela let the cheshire grin fall into a real one.

"Hey there tall and dark, do you ever get nostalgic for who you were at twenty?"

"Are you kidding? It walked and it talked, but it wasn't being lead around by the upper brain." He crossed his arms and leaned against the door jam. "Why? You feeling old, Ange?"

She thought about it. She'd been a princess, once, but lately the youth of the realm has started to seem, well, young. Their righteous idealism so earnest, and so obviously impossible. Make love not war; until it was your best friend bleeding, your almost-lover missing. Then you took up the war hammer and filled the world with the red of your rage.

"No, I feel like a queen."

He just smiled at the cryptic statement, which was good. Unquestioned weirdness probably meant she hadn't really lost her edge. It also drove back the sorrow that had clung to him lately. Oh so coincidently cropping up at the exact same time that Brennan started aggressively pretending everything in her world was peachy.

"What's going on, Booth?" she asked and the guy looked at her with a comic sort of horror. Some psychic wavelength making him look like she'd caught him with his hand not in the cookie jar, but inside the zip of his jeans.

"I mean, this case, it's creeping me out a little," she confided, before he could start to babble. She would find out what had gone on between those two, but now wasn't the time. He pushed off the wall, and paced over to where she sat.

"What do you mean?" his face open and waiting, being such a cop. She harpooned a glare into him.

"Don't play dumb. This case is weird, and we all know it. Serial killers kill in the same way. It's sort of what their known for. Except for these two kids. Sam was stabbed, and Dana was killed by an overdose."

Booth rubbed a cheek, hesitated, then gave in. "Maybe Dana Marquez was a test case. To make sure it worked, or something. Because that grave, I still think he must have known her."

"So, the carjacking was a head fake?"

He looked impressed, and she was just deciding to read him the riot grrl act, when she caught the light behind his chauvinism. Instead she just gave him the slow, slow curve of what she knew was a first class pair of fuck-me lips.

"I learned it from a football player. Did you play football, Booth?" She let her wide eyes take a tour of his shoulders, then flick across his hips to his thighs. "Bet you did, big boy like you."

He shifted, and darted an uneasy look in Hodgins direction. She felt a sudden, and this time sincere urge to kick him in the balls. He saw it, and grinned unrepentantly. _Oh, snap_, as the young said.

"Why are you here, anyways?" she demanded.

"Cam said you were working on whatever was used to stab Samuel Klemm," he said. She simply pointed to the wireframe model splayed across an oversized monitor. He leaned in close, examined it with careful attention, then looked back at her.

"Let me know when you're finish?"

She nodded coldly.

"We'll get him, Ange. No other choice, with you working the computer magic," he said, and waited to see if she'd respond. When she didn't, he gave her desk two infuriating little raps with his knuckle, and walked out.

Actually, she was fairly certain he swaggered out, but didn't verify. The smile she was working to squash was bad enough. Goddamn man. Those nuns should have beaten him harder, or locked him in an iron mask. Definitely one. Maybe both?

Once he was out of sight, she sank back into the code tweaking. Adding shadow and depth to the stiletto, and the next time she looked out, Jack seemed to feel her attention. Looking up to give her a wave and a smile, which she gave right back.

Princesses lived inside color, but Queens didn't bow.

()

Booth sauntered away from Angela's office. She wasn't watching, but she'd sense it. She was good at those things, and he kept it going until he was well around the curve of the hallway. Then he ambled over to Bones' office.

She was standing in the middle of the floor, holding a sheet of x-ray film up to the ceiling lights. They shown through the greyscale celluloid, highlight the planes of her uplifted face. Catching her perfect concentration as she effortlessly read what he couldn't even recognize as language.

The sight worked a hot shiver inside his chest, and he stopped dead. God, why him? Always falling for the smart ones. Rebecca, in her ragged Ole Miss sweatshirt, scragging his ass in barroom trivia. Tessa, reading legal briefs in nothing but glasses and his button down. Catherine in nothing at all, curled against his chest and lecture him on oceanic mineralogy. Bones with the light -

He shut the thought down, before it could hurt too much.

She realized he was there, and arm still raised up, head twisted around to look at him, refocused with obvious effort. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said quickly, "just, someone walked over my grave is all." Ah yes, that look of confused impatience as her arm dropped, but he plowed right over it. "Whatcha got there?"

"Oh," she looked down at the x-ray like she'd been caught doing something naughty. Shoving it back into an overside manila envelope. "I was looking at the latest film of Tau's arm. It's well aligned, and starting to remodel."

"That was a nice thing you did," he told her, but she just gave him a look.

"It would have been extremely hard to say no. Charlie looked like he might cry. _You _looked like you might cry."

"I don't cry."

"You cried when the Flyers lost the world cup," she said like it was true.

"Stanley Cup, Bones, and they had a 3-0 lead, Three. Zero. before Fleury - "

He stopped. Things had gotten a little fuzzy after the Flyers goalie had let two past him in just 51 seconds. There had been yelling, right? Yelling and standing and, and, and, arm waving, but no tears because, because, _focus for god sakes, _"I don't cry."

"Are you aware of the definition of a tautology?" she asked, a smirk in the words.

"I _don't _cry."

"Okay." But oh, the tone.

"Can we please just focus here?" he said quite reasonably, but all she did was look at him with bright eyes.

"What?"

"You sound like me."

He laughed. It was true, so why not. It even made her smile, and compliantly follow him out to the truck. Taking the passenger seat without complaint so she could read the jacket he'd handed across.

He got just enough time to pull into the flow of traffic before that wrinkle in her brow was turning his way. "But there was no sexual molestation."

"Come on, Bones. She was in the ground for two years. Can you really say that with absolute certainty?"

"Twenty months," she corrected, "but you're right, there's no way to know what kind of soft tissue damage - " but she stopped, cutting off details he probably didn't want anyway. Worrying her lip as her fingers bent a corner of the stiff folder over and back, over and back.

"Bones?" he nudged after five or six blocks.

"When we found the grave, I felt - " she broke off again, considering for a long moment. "I do feel it, you know. When a child dies. The same thing you and Cam feel. All that sorrow, and outrage. I feel them."

He studied her, surprised and worried. Where had she gotten the idea -

- and then a horn blared right in his ear.

"Jesus fuck!" he cried, flinching away from the sound. Jerking the truck back onto it's own lane.

"Booth! Pay attention!" Bones snapped, her pointy goddamn finger stabbing emphatically towards the road in front of them. "There! To the road!"

"All right, all right," he muttered. "I am, all right? I'm paying attention." Completely true. Sudden terror provided a wonderful focus.

"You should let me drive," she said after a beat.

"No!"

"Fine," she huffed and slumped down in her seat. No doubt looking daggers, but he wasn't about to take his eyes off the road.

All of which pretty much killed his little moment of reassurance dead. At least he hadn't thrown his hand out, like he did with Parker. Raw panic making his arm believe it could do the job better than seatbelt and airbags. His kid took the occasional chest slap in stride. Bones would probably whack him one for copping a feel, or lecture him on how many Newton-feet of car crash his arm would've been crushed by. Probably both.

"Where are we going, anyway?" She demanded, pissy as hell.

"To see that guy," he jerked his chin towards the file she still held. "Everett Emery Eggelston. Veterinarian assistant, and the exact sort of no-brain weenie wagger who might decide he wants more, and then jack it up entirely."

"You think the fatal overdose was accidental?"

"Yes."

"What about Samuel Klemm. How does he fit in?"

"I dunno, Bones," he said too sharply, still jangling from adrenaline, and had to consciously toned it down. "That's why were gonna go shake the tree, see what falls out. Maybe this guy decided murder was a better thrill than wagging Mr. Rogers in some kid's face."

"Sweets would say that was highly improbable."

"Yeah well," he groused, then decided he was already in for a penny language wise. "Fuck Sweets, too."

Only he wasn't done with the language. He hit new inspiration once they finished turning Eggelston upside-down, backside-forward, and rearside-in. They practically did the hokey pokey and shook him all about, but in the end the man had an alibi.

He was, get this, with his kiddy diddler therapy group. Confirmed by the First Methodists CCTV system.

Which was not only a supreme irony, but also the last of their leads.

* * *

A/N: See, see? Three chapters in three days. I can be good, I swear! Do I deserve a scooby snack?


	6. Chapter 6

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 6**

Morning. A Thursday morning. How long since she'd been excited for Thursday?

Years, at least. Since before -

No. Not the time to be thinking about Jack. His hansom face, and the darkness that hid behind it. How, near the end, she'd started looking at him before answering a question, before daring to take up space.

That frightened little wisp had been liberated, had liberated herself, and right now she wanted to think about Seeley Booth. His quiet kindness, and the twinkle in his eyes, and the way his pants slouched so perfectly.

Okay. Well. That wasn't very productive either. "Cool your jets," she told the woman in the mirror. "You're being an idiot." The woman agreed, but didn't, couldn't, stop smiling. She rolled her eyes at the fool, put on her mascara, and went to work.

He called at three, and the thought of his canceling again was a sharp stab, but he just wanted to know if she'd be willing to meet at the Jeffersonian. To make parking easier.

She had agreed, and now she was standing in the Medico-Legal lab, looking towards the steel and sterile platform that her date, and his partner, were standing in the middle of. They were talking.

Maybe talking?

He was speaking, but she stood rigidly. Looking past him and refusing to acknowledge his words. Touching a hand to her shoulder, he ducked down to coax her eyes, but she shrugged it off. He took the hand back, but whatever comment he added was the breaking straw. She met his eyes with a darkly sardonic look, lips moving in something that looked biting. She smiled though, and so did he.

Inside, the brass drum that had been pacing her heart all day faltered. He caught sight of her standing below the platform, and his smile shifted. Lighting something that curled a twist into her stomach. Heat and butterflies, banishing that little moment of ice.

He was quiet during dinner, but sat close and leaned in frequently. His eyes steady and interested as she lead the conversation. Later that night, watching the pale jut of his shoulder above the bed sheets, she thought how easy would be to get used to this feeling; this man.

* * *

_He was THOR! God of Thunder! God of the Hammer! Cower, ye lesser gods and mortals, before his -_

"Doctor Hodgins."

_his thunderous -_

"Hodgins."

_wrath!_

"Jack!"

Thor squeaked like a girl and dropped his hammer. Then he panicked and dove for it. Catching it just before it made a solid _thunk _on the hard floor.

"Hey!" he barked from the floor. "Do you have any idea how priceless this is?"

"You could tell me."

He scrambled up, and set the flawless example of Norse tool mongery down very gently. The Scandinavian Studies would take it out on his softy, squishy corpus if it returned from composition study in pieces. Then he swung around and glared his very best glare.

"Or" his boss continued, "instead, we could just assume that little display was a momentary lapse of judgment, and you can jump right to the status report." Her finger made a little air jump, and his glare withered on the vine. The faintest hint of a smile kicked at Cam's lips, and Jack panicked. Brain revving. Eyes skittering off metal and plastic and Wendell's sympathetic look, desperate for a - a - a - there! Pointy things!

He snatched one up, and stabbed it vigorously into a block of clay. "Still working! Making progress! Very busy!"

He cast a wild glance backwards. Cam's lips were twitching. Her lips were twitching, and her eyebrows were struggling, and just like that his brain sidestepped the clutch and shot into third gear. Not Thor. Jack Hodgins. Entomologist, Botanist, Mineralogist, and living example of the endocrine system's response to acute embarrassment.

"I, uh, I did find something interesting," he told her, using sheer force of will to make her overlook the fact that he was the color of a bruised tomato. She made an obvious effort, and managed to force her face into an interrogative look.

"The kid, Samuel Klemm. In the autopsy report, you said his carotid was punctured. Not slashed?"

"Yes," she said, laughter suddenly gone. Nothing left but those sharp angles that snapped together so seamlessly. A perfect shield that always made him wonder what being a cop in New York City was really like.

"It made me think. I mean, a 6-year-old's carotid artery is what, maybe 5-millimeters in diameter? The murder was either really luck, or really knowledgeable to have hit it first try."

"Well, a veterinarian could probably figure out human anatomy. It's just another link in the chain we'll use to nail this guy," Cam reasoned.

"Mixed metaphor," Jack grinned. "Chain. Nail. You should say we'll used it hang him."

"Watch it," she warned, "or the security tape of your little hammer swinging extravaganza will somehow end up on Youtube."

"Buh," was all that he got out before someone said: "not a veterinarian," from directly behind him. Cam looked over his shoulder in a completely unsurprised way, and nasty paranoia sank fangs into Jack's guts.

He spun, but Booth only flicked him a mildly puzzled look before going back to Cam. "What's his problem?"

"Nervous condition," she said. "Why not a veterinarian?"

"None of 'em check out. We sweated the last one yesterday, but he had an alibi."

"What does that leave us?" Cam demanded sharply.

"Bubqkus," Booth said. He kind of sighed it out, really, and Jack took a good look at him. Still tall, still annoyingly ripped, but a five o'clock shadow already darkened his jaw, and there were circles under his eyes.

"Did you find what kind of murder weapon was used?" he asked, looking so hopeful that Jack wanted to say yes.

"I've found lots of things it isn't," he finally said, with an upbeat little twist, and Booth grimaced.

"What's the hold up?"

"Angle," Jack admitted. "The weapon entered the artery nearly parallel to the neck, almost like a blood draw. Threading into the vein, instead of punching through both walls. It stretched the skin, tore it, but didn't actually cut."

"So, you're saying the weapon started out pointy, then flared to a wider diameter," Booth interpreted, showing the keen intelligence he was always quick to scoff off.

"Exactly," Jack nodded, the pointed to a blown up picture of the wound on Samuel Klemm's neck." "Look at this, though. See how the skin's stretched here, but not here? The model Ange came up with isn't uniformly tapered. It comes to a point flatly on one side, and tapers on the other."

"What could do that?" Booth asked. Jack waved a hand over the paraphernalia spread across his work bench. Spikes. Multi-tools. Awls. All too flat; too round; too dull. Too not fucking right.

"None of these."

Cam and Booth both surveyed the mess glumly. Then Booth sharpened, honing in on something set to one side. "What's that?" he asked, perfect mildness pouring off him. Pointing at one ancient and literally priceless Norse sledgehammer. "Doesn't look very pointy."

Cam smiled. Jack blushed.

Then he smiled with them as they laughed at him. When you got right down to it, the fringe benefits of this job really sucked. Bad hours, really crappy coffee. Not to mention the nightmares that left him shaking and crying. Up on his knees as he choked on nothing and clawed towards light that was already shining. Offering his soul to any taker who could bring freedom from that crushing dark.

So yeah, maybe the psychological effects of working with psycho killers lingered. Maybe it'd been this job that got him into that situation in the first place, but it was also the reason someone had been in the dark with him. The reason someone's hand had been there to pull him out. Definitely the reason for the woman who slept beside him every night.

He stabbed the business end of a knife into the block of clay, and decided that if these people couldn't poke a little fun, who could?

()

As an anthropologist, Temperance Brennan had been trained to observe. She was, in fact, quite good at it.

For example: she could see Booth standing out in the lab. Talking to Cam and Hodgins about something that made him slump and drag a rough hand down his face.

Interestingly enough, she could also see Booth standing outside the main doors. Smudging the glass as he pressed his face to it, hands cupped to cut the glare.

Two Booths. Fortunately for quantum theory, only one of them topped five feet.

Brennan decided that whatever this was, it probably fell under the theory of forewarned being equal to forearmed. Across the lab the taller Booth abruptly perked up, pointing to something on the lab bench. Then he punched Hodgins in the shoulder, and started her way.

"No," she said once he had a toe past the door, not bothering to look up from the computer screen. The peripheral blur of him hesitated, then continued forward.

"No what?"

"I'm busy, Booth."

He sighed. A tremulous susurration of acute suffering he used whenever he thought she was being unreasonable. "It's Friday, Bones. You know, the weekend. Time to get out of the office."

"I work in a lab. Not an office." She decided against a line of text, highlighting it and deleting with exclusive attention. This time, his sigh was much less theatrical, and she suppressed a smile. Sometimes easy rewards were still satisfying.

"Also, I saw Parker in the hallway." She rolled her eyes up to glance at him over the top of the computer screen. "You do know glass is transparent, right? It can't stop him from seeing into the lab."

"Yeah, Bones. Of course I know glass is - " he cut himself off, looking determined. "Look, that's not the point. It's Friday. I've got Parker. It's time for you to come be a village. End of story."

"What? No! You don't get to just dictate when I have to spend time with your son," she protested. "These things need to be planned."

He planted his fists on the edge of her desk, leaning forward over his knuckles until all three of his tricep heads bulged. "Yes," he murmured low, eyes intent on hers. "I do. I get to dictate."

"Why?" she demanded, only it didn't have the edge she intended. His face was very close to hers now. She could see the soft beat of the pulse at his throat, and it all seemed very familiar. Being near him, and leaning in closer.

"Because I'm Seeley Joseph Booth. Father of Parker Matthew Booth." He said it like it meant something. Then he seemed to realize how little space was between them. Standing abruptly and backing up. "Come on, the kid wants to see you. Are you really going to disappoint him?"

She craned over towards where Parker stood. Now talking to Angela about something, arms moving in broad descriptive waves. Very probably describing something exploding, possibly with blood.

"Did you just use your son as blackmail?" She looked back at Booth. He didn't answer, just grinned. She blew out a breath, and he bounced on his toes, forehead grooving into hopeful line. She shut the computer down.

Forewarned and forearmed did not always lead to tactical victory. Besides, Parker seemed genuinely happy to see her. He spent the ride to dinner telling her about Tommy Willis, envied for his ability to shoot a soup noodle out his nose. She described for him the structure and function of the sinus cavity, concentrating mostly on the pustulant ailments.

It kept his attention all the way to the restaurant door, but even polychondritis couldn't compete against the row upon row of arcade games waiting inside. Parker, looking very much like his father had earlier, quivered in place just long enough for Booth to supply a bucket of game tokens, then slingshotted himself into the melee of noise and light.

"Thanks for that, Bones," Booth said once they had been seated, the noise in no way blocking the sarcasm in his voice. "I'm sure detailed descriptions of ruptured nasal polyps are sure to push him towards a life of science."

"I thought I was supposed to be spending time with him," she said, vainly trying to search out his blond head amongst the churning masses. Booth pointed towards a row of very realistic looking motorcycles bolted in front of very large screens. Sure enough, Parker was straddling one. Crouched low in the imaginary wind.

"Don't worry. He'll come back when the food gets here. You can tell him all about black tubercles."

"There's no such thing," she told him, poking at a milkshake that was mediocre at best. Already anticipating a soggy veggie burger and a pile of under- and/or overcooked fries. "Why do we come here?"

Booth shrugged, sucking vigorously on his own milkshake, mumbling around a mouthful. "Because the kid loves it."

There wasn't much arguing with that. Instead she watched Parker slalom around a curve and barrel down a straightaway. A little semicircle of people behind him, as intent as if the racetrack were real. She smiled.

Over the metal rim of his milkshake cup Booth peered at her.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing. I was just remembering. Russ. He used to take me to the arcade. He and his friends would go out back to smoke m - " She stopped, but Booth grinned.

"Way past the statute of limitations, Bones."

"Cigarettes," she amended, just for safety sake, "and I would play Pac man. It was fun."

"That sounds nice," he said, the little crinkles around his eyes appearing. She smiled back, and felt time stretch out a little. Sitting with him in this little cubby, populated mostly by couples and insulated by the dull roar. This too felt nice.

Eventually he broke away. Returning to his milkshake, watching his son in the distance. After a while she said, "You seemed very discouraged, talking to Hodgins and Cam this afternoon."

"You saw that, huh?"

She nodded. Across the table he sighed, and slumped, and finally spoke.

"We've got nothing, Bones. No murder weapon, no suspect, no motive. Been a while since we've been this stuck."

"The park surveillance hasn't turned up anything?"

"Deer," Booth said.

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh," Booth said, frustration showing through his attempt to play it off.

"We'll figure it out. We always do," she told him.

The crinkles around his eyes deepened for a moment, the way they did when she said something he found appealing, but it didn't last. His chin dropped, restless hands stabbing at his now watery milkshake. She regretted it's passing.

"Yeah, how many more kids have to die before we do that?"

"We'll catch him," she repeated. Because she couldn't think of anything else to say, and because it was true. His thumb beat a tattoo against the table as he gave her a level stare.

"Sure," he finally said. Then he swiveled around to watch Parker. A conversational gambit that even she couldn't misconstrue. She looked at the place on the back of his head where his hair swirled into a constantly thwarted cowlick, and swallowed against the sensation of ice piercing vital things.

Knowing that it was just her enteric nervous system reacting to stress, and not an actual injury did not make the sensation any more pleasant. Her stomach had dropped below her feet, and now it did not want to come back.

She swallowed again, carefully smoothing her hand over the paper placemat their server had put in front of her. Not looking up even when she heard him sigh and shift back around.

"I'm sorry Bones. It's just, this case. It's rough; no reason to take it out on you, though. Okay?"

No, it was not okay. He was lying, or at least evading. She'd seen him angry before, seen him frustrated. Five years made for a great amount of observation time, and Booth was amazingly consistent. He never got angry at the wrong person.

"You're mad at Sweets," she pointed out. He snorted.

"Course I'm mad at Sweets. Only a moron wouldn't be."

"Why?"

Booth shifted uncomfortably, eyes daring away and back before he answered. "He gave me some bad advice."

"About taking a gamble?" she guessed. Booth tightened even more, then he sighed again, seeming to resign himself. She found it highly unreassuring.

"Yeah, Bones. About the vicissitudes of the brain."

She traced the wet ring left by her water glass, wondering if it would be better to just let this go. Move the conversation back to something neutral and try to enjoy the evening, but Booth must have thought her silence was condemnatory, because he shifted uncomfortably.

"I'm not mad at you, Bones," he finally said again, sounding defeated. Like maybe he was simply too tired to work up the vehemence. It squashed the last of the ease that had existed just five minutes ago.

"You can't be mad at Sweets, and not mad at me," she pressed, dogged even in this.

"Okay, fine," his voice was sharp. "Maybe I should. Maybe I am, a little."

It caught in her throat. Pricking in her eyes and bending her head towards the table. A pointless exercise in hiding.

"But not permanently. Not forever," he said. She nodded, accepting his words without understanding how they could be true. She'd hurt him. Had, and was, and would again.

"How - ", she started to ask, but his eyes moved past her. When she twisted to follow, she saw Parker making a beeline towards them. Hot on the trail of a server, tray piled high with extremely unhealthy food.

"We'll solve it Bones," he told softly in the last seconds before boy and food both descended. She nodded back, not really knowing if he was talking about the case, or Sweets, or this new tension between them.

She wanted to crawl away, but there were plates to be shuffled, and silverware to be unwrapped, and napkins to drape across their laps. There were the culinary habits of Kodiak bears to discuss (did you know they eat _grass, _Bones), and skepticism over the usefulness of fractions to be dispelled.

A thousand and one things that had to be accomplished, and above them all was how very wrong everything still felt.

* * *

_Along came a Spider._

Lance Sweets felt the thought scuttle across his own skin. Jerking up to dart frantic little looks past the puddle of desk lamp, into the dark corners. Which was stupid.

He was in the Hoover, guarded by stout metal detectors, stouter guards, and generally avoided by the psychotically deranged. Also, every corner was currently occupied by stack upon dusty, drunken stack of file folders. No room for a real live spider, let alone a psychotically deranged killer.

Conclusion: there were definitely no psychotically deranged killers in his office. The building was probably clean too. He forced his shoulders down, but it didn't help the creepy crawls.

Unsurprising, really. The file clerk had felt essentially the same. Giving him increasingly fish eyed looks as she scanned his search parameters. He'd tried his most benign smile, and she slid the request chit back towards him using just the tips of her fingers. Flat out refusing to pull the files without an official request. In triplicate. By an actual agent.

Very unlikely to happen on a Saturday afternoon. Especially considering Booth had decided whatever had gone wrong between him and Dr. Brennan was directly Lance Sweet's fault. So he'd lied. It had worked amazingly well.

Booth might, in actual truth, try to kill him for that kind of name dropping. Plus he'd definitely blued his own balls for at least a week, canceling on Daisy like that, but it was worth it. Totally worth it. Because on file umpteen and seventy-two, he'd just found what he was looking for.

* * *

A/N: No scooby snacks? No scooby snacks at all?


	7. Chapter 7

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 7**

Sunday morning Booth woke with a start. Wrenched out of that shitty old dream about the hospital. Being strapped down and not knowing who, or what, or where he was.

The exact same dream that never failed to leave him completely freaked out. ICU psychosis, they called it. Mental confusion brought on by weakness and terror. Aggravated by bright lights, constant noise, and incredible suffering.

Going absolutely bugfuck was more like it. Believing for two full days that his hospital room was really the same dank hole the guerrilla soldiers had stuck him in. Ripping out his tubes and wires, then landing in a heap on the floor because his legs wouldn't hold him. Crying when they came to shove him back behind his prison of bed rails.

The whole thing was almost enough to make him grateful Bones hadn't been around to get an eyeful of him. Tied ankle and wrist to the bed. Screaming that he was a US solider at the top of his lungs because he believed the nurse changing his bandage was trying to kill him.

Stumbling out of bed, he shoved the dream aside. Brushing his teeth and waking Parker, who wasn't much more enthusiastic. Dragging his feet and scowling through every step of getting washed, dressed, and packed.

They went to church, and by the time they had shuffled through the communion line, the grip of the dream had faded. Back in their pew, Parker knelt beside him having finally woken up and found a sunnier disposition. Enthusiastically adding his still high voice to the off key hymn that echoed through the vaulted gothic arches.

At ten he was just starting to really grasp the concept of God. Really starting to grasp a whole bunch of stuff, and Booth felt a sharp ache of love for his kid.

Sure, in less than an hour he'd have to hand Parker off. Chat with Rebecca and Brent over donuts and coffee, then watch him climb into their mini-van. Gone for another 288 hours, but even that feeling couldn't make him give up the 36 hours he got.

"Bye Dad!" Parker screamed out the window. Booth waved back, watching the van go around a corner. Feeling himself morph back into the man he was when Parker wasn't around. A little shaper. A little harder.

Good timing, as it turned out. His phone vibrated against his thigh.

"Agent Booth?" a female voice asked, after a seconds pause.

"Yes."

"This is Toby Hadley. I'm sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but I - can we meet?"

He gave her a corner near his building, walking back slowly to kill the half hour it would take her to get across town. A little to slowly. When he came round the corner, she was already sitting on the front steps of his building. Blue jeans, and a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

"Lucky guess?" he asked lightly. "I give you the corner; you're sitting right on my step."

She looked up, letting the hood fall back, and the transformation was shocking. Hollow eyed as his nightmare men. Sallow, with the bones of her face standing out more sharply than he remembered.

Well, he chastised himself, she had cause. Grief wasn't exactly a day at the beach.

"You're not the only one with access to secure data bases," she told him diffidently.

He shrugged, accepting the fact, and sat beside her. "You remember something?" he asked, knowing very well she hadn't. This was about something else.

Her lips narrowed to a line, and her head shook, but the words wouldn't come past whatever was in her throat. She saw his understanding, and looked away for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds. Trying for mastery.

"Toby?" he prompted after a minute went by.

"I found Lexi with a knife this morning."

Well. Shit.

"Did she hurt herself?" he asked, very calmly.

"No. I don't think she was even thinking of it. Not really. She was just standing there, looking at it, like she had no idea what it was. I took it from her. She let me, but she looked at me. Just stared, like I was . . . ." Toby made a quick swipe of her face across the shoulder of her sweatshirt, then faced him square.

"I need the names; of those shrinks."

He returned her steady gaze, not buying it for a second. Names she could have just by opening the computer lid. This was something else. The moment had stretched into discomfort, and he could see that it was will alone that keeping her meeting his eyes.

"It's not the same, Toby," he said, and something deeply sullen flared behind her eyes.

"What do you mean?" she demanded. Then: "Look, just give me the names. Okay?"

"Whatever she said, it wasn't true. She's grieving, she's not really accountable right now."

"I know," Toby said, so convincingly that he wavered. Maybe she really had come for those names. It wasn't like her wife could go to the wanks at the Navy Yard mental health clinic. Except that darkness behind her eyes; he'd seen that before, and it never lied.

"Whoever you killed, Toby, however many, it wasn't the same."

For a second, he thought she might deck him. Female didn't cancel out Marine, and usually the smaller they were, the more viscously dirty they fought. Then she relaxed.

"Not that different," she said, and there was a whole ocean, a whole 17 quadrillion gallons of anguish in it. "Sam is dead, and when Lexi looks at me, she sees a killer."

"You're not a murder," be told her. "There's a difference."

She looked at him. A long, long evaluation with an expressionless face. He didn't need it, though. He knew what she was doing. A murder was a killer, but not all killers were murders. The same tangle of belief and unbelief that twisted inside him was inside her. He'd found his peace, but October Hadley had had her's ripped away.

"Maybe that's one of the reasons I need those names," Toby finally said, making it clear their little tete a tete was done. He pulled a card from his wallet, scribbling on the back.

"Call this guy, tell him I referred you. He calls himself a chef nowadays, but he's the best out there."

She gave him a distinct look of doubt, but took the card took. "Thanks."

He nodded, groping for some sort of final words, but she didn't allow it. Just shoved off the step.

"See you around," she tossed over a shoulder as she strode away. Hands in her pockets like she was out for a walk. Booth watched her until she was gone, and then he just sat, looking at the building across from his.

Eventually he dug his phone out of his pocket. Flicked it open and found Catherine's home number. He didn't press send, though. Just looked at the building some more before snapping it back shut.

He changed into PT gear, and wasted an hour at the gym. Then he went to work and sat with his feet up on the desk. Looking through the V of his feet, contemplating how existentially fucked everything had somehow become. Staring idly at a post-it in Sweets' hand writing that had been stuck to his computer monitor. _See me_; in capital letters.

Right.

He stayed until it was dark, getting absolutely nothing accomplished. Then he went home, dreamt something nonspecifically upsetting, and woke with a groan. Got up, ate, and drove to work. Second verse, same as the first.

Except not. Because today Sweets would be pestering him and Bones would be avoiding him. Well, screw that.

He pulled back out of the lot, and double timed it to the Medico-Legal into the Jeffersonian, where he smashed full into Angela, speeding out of her office with her tail on fire.

"Booth," she breathed, like he was a minor miracle. Then spun on one spiky heel and bellowed "Brennan!" across the hushed lab.

Surprisingly enough, Bones actually startled. Kind of contradicting the general assumption she wouldn't notice a passing tornado as long as it didn't disturb her precious skeleton.

"You too," Angela spoke again, threading a hand into his tie and walking back towards her office. He followed. He kind of had to, which was probably the idea, but jeez, whatever happened to _please_ and _thank you_?

"Whatever happened to Please and Thank You?" he grumbled.

"Shut up," Angela told him with threatening cheer. Peering intently at her fancy pants computer monitors, poking at the control pad.

"My kid has better manners than you," he told the back of her head, yanking hard against the knot of his tie. This time Angela turned around, a conciliatory smile flicking across her lips.

He started to smile back, because Angela's smile was something even pond scum would have a hard time resisting, but her eyes went past him.

"Angela, what?" Bones demanded as she swept through the doorway. Her lab coat flaring out around her, sounding altogether pissed. He smirked in the artists direction, but she didn't notice.

"I found them," she said.

There was a little pause. Durning which Bones came to a halt, and sent him not one but two furtive little glances that he clearly wasn't supposed to notice. He bit back a sigh, completely unexcited to participate in this latest round of Angela-is-clever.

"Found what, Ange? The secret to life?"

"That would be an 'it', genius boy. Singular. I clearly said _them,_" she told him evenly. She'd seen Bones' little eye shimmy though. Seen it, and found it extremely interesting. For her part, Bones just gave them both equally impatient looks.

"Why are you being mean to Booth?" she asked, but Angela just waved it away.

"Never mind, sweetie. It's not important." She spun back round fast enough to make her ponytail swing, poking buttons on the control pad. On the screens, windows began opening, then rapidly collapsing, too fast to figure out what sort of information they displayed.

"Hodgins can't sleep. Which means I can't sleep. Which means I've had a lot of time to think about how weird this case is. I mean, normal serial killers have a pattern right? So there must be something that ties these victims together."

"Sure," Booth said, "I've got three people and one Charlie tearing those kid's lives apart, but nothing so far."

"Well, good think I know how to take things into my own very capable hands." Angela managed a sideways look and a smirk, which, for reasons he chose not to dwell on, Bones actually got. A little smile chasing itself across her mouth.

"Ange," she admonished lightly, "what have you found out?"

"This," Angela said simply. One the glass sheet in front of them, the froth of activity had calmed down to one window, pulsing slowly, showing a long list of companies and non-profits. "I spent the weekend writing a script that would search through over three hundred databases for any instances of the name Samuel Klemm or Dana Marquez."

"Neither of those names are statistically unique," Bones pointed out, crossing her arms as she studied the display.

"Right, which is why I spent this morning tweaking the script to return only the databases that contain both names," Angela redirected, tapping until the window collapsed down to fewer than 20 listings.

"Narrow it down a little further by excluding events that happened before both victims were born, and you're left with this," and then there were only three listings.

"Wait," Bones said a little breathlessly, pointing eagerly towards the screen. Finding the pattern just that fraction faster than his own brain could. "That one, the first one. Ange, those donation dates match the month each of the victims died."

"Uh-huh," Angela hummed, the little noise sleek with pleasure.

"Not bad," Booth drawled, giving her a grin. She accepted it as nothing less than her due.

"You better believe it," she agreed. He rolled his eyes, and the look she gave back implied that flattery was no distraction. True to form though, Bones was already onto the next thing. Thinking face on as she studied the screen.

"What's Theory-In-Motion?"

"Hell if I know, Bones," he thumbed his cell phone open, "but I bet Charlie can find out. Then maybe we'll have someone we can ask a few questions, hey?"

To that, Bones granted him almost full eye contact. Sliding past the tip of his nose before darting back to the monitors. Beside him, Angela upped the atmospheric pressure just a little. Booth suppressed a sigh, pressing the phone to his ear and turning his back instead. A move that brought into perfect line of sight one Lance Sweets. Standing in the doorway with an incredibly knowing look on his face and a fist full of manila folders in his hand.

Across the dead airspace, the phone connected, but Booth snapped it closed on Charlie's greeting. Leveling a look straight out of Fort Jackson at the man in the doorway. To his credit, Sweets stood a little straighter.

"Agent Booth, I left a note asking to speak with you."

"Did you?" It was pure bullshit, and Sweets' face darkened a little, but he didn't let it show much. Just nodded. "On your computer monitor."

"Haven't been to the office yet."

Behind him clothes rustled. Bones, taking a step towards him. Closer than she would have been if Sweets hadn't decided on a social call, and it made him even angrier. Because this was what Sweets was always trying to poke a sharp-ass stick into. This partnership.

"There was also an email, but I suppose you haven't checked it since Friday."

"Nope." Even Bones knew that one was a lie. Sweets breathed slowly out his nose, then he brushed it off. Toleration, not intimidation. Somewhere along the line, his balls had dropped.

"Okay, well. It doesn't matter. We're all here now. Angela, you said you found Samuel Klemm and Dana Marquez' names in the donation list for some non-profit?" Angela nodded, and Sweets' teachers pet grin came rushing back. "Well, I'm pretty sure I have a few to add."

Things got very predicable after that. Angela demanding details, Bones spluttering about correlation and causation, and Sweets smiling like he'd just won a prize.

"Hey!" Booth finally barked, forcing the words out past a jaw that wanted to lock. "Dead kids, remember?"

Bone managed to look a little abashed, and Angela made it all the way to contrite, but Sweets just shifted his attention, eyes still glittering. Booth shoved a finger in his face before he could haul off and say something truly infuriating.

"Explain, Sweets. Quickly. Two seconds."

"You've been looking at the kids for commonalities, but it's the parents," Sweets finally obliged. Behind his shoulder, Bones sucked indignant air, but Booth snapped around and drilled her with a glare. Her open mouth snapped closed, but she wasn't happy about it.

"Except for Samuel Klemm, all the kids were the products of single parent homes," Sweets added, without any more prompting.

"So you think that's the cause? Some psycho killing kids from broken homes? Cause you know, that doesn't really narrow the pool of potential victims a whole hell of a lot."

He could feel his cool starting to slip, but Sweets just shook his head like a puppy killing a stuffed toy. "No, not divorced. Not present. In two of the cases, the male parent was deceased. In the other four, the father abandoned the mother and child. None of the women even had boyfriends."

"What does that mean?" Angela asked quietly. Like she wan't sure she really wanted to know.

"It means that the killer was picking mothers who lacked the ready made support system engendered by a co-parent."

"Okay, and what does that mean?" Booth asked with a dangerous patience. Parker would have recognized it as bad news, but it didn't phase Sweets any. Worse, it seemed to free Bones from the effects of his earlier glare. Crossing her arms as skepticism practically steamed out her ears.

"What about Alexis Klemm and October Hadley?" she demanded. "_Cum hoc, ergo proctor hoc _is a fallacy, Sweets."

"Totally," Sweets nodded like that made sense. "That part doesn't quite fit yet, but I assure you Dr. Brennan, I'm not wrong about the rest. Let Angela put the names into her program. Most, if not all of them will come back with a hit."

Bones huffed, percolating discontent. She couldn't argue against trying, but Booth could tell she wanted to, just on general principal. Angela, who had been silent and was now pale, was the one who reached for the files.

"You guys? Just give me the files, and then go away. You're giving me a headache," she told them. Sweets handed the files over, and Angela spun around, slapping them down with too much force.

Bones looked at her friend with startlement, flashing into worry before getting lost under a spasm of pained uncertainty. She made an aborted twitch forward, and Booth nearly reached for her shoulder. A quick squeeze, to remind her not to let her brain out-think her emotions. Then he remembered Sweets was watching, and he stifled the thought.

Sweets noticed anyway, giving him a knowing smirk, and Booth felt his generalized exasperation sharpen again. A hard spurt of dangerous heat that that he had no chance of keeping off his face. It should have made Sweets back off in a hurry, but he didn't. Just shifted to a different sort of knowing look that made Booth's fist want to curl.

It also made Bones glance towards them, brow wrinkled and clearly about to ask what the hell was wrong with them. Then the computer pinged. Angela rocked back in surprise, and it sounded again. Six times, for six matches.

"Woah," Sweets breathed, summing it up for all of them.

* * *

Things were going wrong. Very badly wrong.

He had allowed for a certain amount of attrition, but the sample size was by necessity, quite small. First Luz Marquez, and now Alexis Klemm. If any more dropped out, the whole thing would be utterly ruined. The losses would have been for nothing. It was very nearly intolerable.

Yet, what could not be changed had to be borne. He breathed deeply; in through the mouth, out through the nose, and thought of the man who had taught him the simple exercise.

Mr. Link, who had come three times a week. Opening the classroom door with that muted click of freedom. Shepherding him towards a glorious hour, away from the incomprehensible babble and noise of his classmates. Sitting together as they filled that little room behind the nurses station with the quiet sound of their breathing and the rustling flick of flashcards decorated with simple cardboard faces.

Happy. Sad. Confused. They made up stories to explain why the kid on the card might feel like that. What they might have gained, or lost, or misunderstood. Only those flashcard kids never matched the startlingly fluid faces of the flesh and blood variety on the playground. Their bewildering laughter, and sudden shrieks. The way they flocked like birds if prey, and shoved him down when he tried to show them the Chinese battery his neighbor had donated to his collection.

_Try a little harder,_ Mr. Link had said; and he had. So busy trying that it had taken him nearly four years to decipher the conspiracy. A Round Robin of parents and teachers, all trying to rob him of the one thing that would let him rise.

It had made him very Angry. Still, the breathing was useful.

* * *

A/N: Just wanted to say hi, and to thank everyone who has favorited this, or written a review. I really appreciate it.


	8. Chapter 8

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 8**

"Well, figure it out!" Booth said into his phone. One or two decibels below a bellow. Also one or two steps from the edge of control. He took a breath, and tried again.

"Sorry, Charlie," he said, reigning everything in firmly. "Just, try again, okay? Those financials are the only lead we've got."

On the other end of the connection, Charlie promised results, and Booth snapped it closed. It been hours since Angela had matched those six names, and the resolution Booth had felt at his fingertips was slipping away.

The money trail petered out into an officious dead end, and it didn't come anywhere near feeling good. Neither, he decided, did the fact that Sweets was striding towards his office, tie practically flapping over his shoulder.

"Any luck?" he asked, settling his skinny backside into a visitors chair.

"No."

"Oh."

Sweets attention was glued to his face. Never a good sign.

"I've been thinking."

"Did it hurt?"

Sweets forehead crinkled, eyebrows beetling together. Startled, but sharpening, and Booth was sorry he'd said anything. "Just, tell me what you found out," he said, before the kid worked around to saying whatever was flitting across his shrinky little mind.

"Right, I've been thinking about the juxtaposition of Dana Marquez' burial. The depth, and the positioning of her hands. We all assumed the reverence had something to do with sexual predation."

"Okay," Booth agreed. Agreeing kept the psychologists away. He smirked, but Sweets didn't notice.

"However, Dr. Brennan didn't find any sign of sexual assault, and then Angela found the donations made in each of the victim's name." Sweets stopped, like he was Nero Wolf, or something. You Now Have All The Information To Solve The Crime.

"And?" Booth ground out.

"Oh, it appears like the killer is attempting to honor his victims sacrifice."

"Sacrifice?"

"Yeah, you know. Like the way we put up monuments to the Unknown Solider. Honoring the sacrifice of the few, for the many."

"Yeah, Sweets. I understand, okay. I was asking you why."

"Oh," Sweets deflated a little. "I don't know."

"Jesus Christ," Booth muttered. Then mentally added it to the tally for Saturday morning. _Bless me Father, for I have committed the sin of blasphemy one hundred and six times, and the near occasion of wanting to throttle a psychologist_.

"Hey," Sweets defended. "Psychology isn't some magic eight ball; shake me and get a murderer."

Booth eyed him. "You're head's shaped a little like an eight ball."

Jared wouldn't have fallen for it, but Sweets didn't have a brother. He snatched his hand back down with a stink eye look. "Yeah, well. You clearly aren't having much luck tracking the financials down, either."

Booth snapped his mouth shut. "Playtime's over, Sweets. I've got work to do."

"No. I don't think so."

Booth regarded him, finger poised for a key strike. Sweets' adams apple bobbed, but his back came up straight, and Booth felt the thing that was about to happen tingle inside his head. A high voltage buzz.

"Agent Booth, why are you so mad at me?"

It sizzled. The way lightening would sing from hair to hair before it roared. Then he was in the eye of the storm. Across the room, and hoisting Sweets by a bicep before brain caught up with body.

"Out."

"No!" Sweets wasn't very calm either, digging his feet into the carpet. "You've been mad at me for months. I deserve to know why."

He stared, mouth practically open, for long enough that Sweets tried a wiggle. "What happened to the headaches?" he finally asked.

"What?" Less wiggling; more confusion.

"In your book," he clarified. "Agent Bench didn't have any headaches. I want to know what happened to them."

Above them, the ventilation whomped. Outside, someone coughed. Here, Sweets stood under his grip.

"Did you know," he spoke when Sweets didn't, "that a pilocytic astrocytoma presents in the cerebellum? Sometimes in the hypotalamus. They cause headaches, blurred vision, slurred speech, hallucinations, the whole nine yards. Now, do you know the one thing they don't cause?"

Under his hand, Sweets gaped. Like the fish he hadn't gotten to catch that Sunday with Bones - big eyes and round mouth. Because Seeley Booth was supposed to be to dumb to wonder what had gone on in his own brain. Too much of a galumping idiot to crack a book.

"Not a single one of them has ever made the Ventral Tegmental Area light up like a Christmas tree," he said. "You lied, Sweets. You lied about my coma, and you lied about my identity confusion, but mostly you lied when told me I didn't love her."

"No!" Sweets said, vehement, but Booth just shook him. Clamping down until bones creaked and his captive flopped like a rag doll.

"Shut up. You told me to gamble, but that was a lie too. It wasn't the right time, and now it'll never be right. You're done Sweets. Understand?"

There was some horrified denial trying to work on Sweets face. The way Jared used to look, hands and knees in the dirt. Scraped up and bleeding from trying to match the bike he, the older brother, was big enough to ride. Round baby eyes filling with tears as the older boys raced away from him.

This wasn't bikes though. This was a hell of a lot more than boys in the dirt. He shook again, and Sweets expression slammed closed.

"I... Yes, I understand."

Booth let go, and Sweets rubbed at the spot, freedom making him look argumentative.

"If I go to the board of psychologist with what you've done, you'll lose your license," Booth told him. Just to shut him up, but Sweets blanched, which just made him feel worse, since that probably meant it was true.

"Get out," Booth told him, and surprisingly enough, he went. Trudging through the outer office, a forest of swivel mount chairs following his progress. Booth retrieved the desk chair that had ricochet off the back wall and sat, staring into nothing, until the shrilling phone made him start.

"What!" he barked, and listened to the little sucked in breath of air on the other end. He was a breath away from trying to tack on some lick-ass little _sir, _when Catherine's voice asked "Bad day?" Husky and perfect.

He glanced at the clock. Almost seven. "Not any more," he said, slouching back into his chair, feeling the smile pulling.

"Dinner?" she asked, and he started to say sure, but it died on his lips. His boss was standing at his office door. Not Hacker, Cullen. Who had practically been a ghost since his daughter died.

Booth shot to his feet. "Hey, Catherine. I'm sorry. I've got to go," he clicked the phone off over her startled acquiescence. "Sir!"

"Booth," Cullen said without any sort of preamble, like he hadn't been practically MIA for four years. "The credit card attached to your murders belongs to Hakim Spenser, son of Daniel Spenser. Hakim seems to be off the grid, but the dad is a professor at Georgetown."

"Ho . . . ," Booth got out, then shut his mouth and accepted the folder being held out. How didn't matter. Not with Cullen standing in the middle of his office looking 30 pounds lighter and twenty years older than he had at the funeral of his only kid.

"Home address?" Booth asked, pulling his jacket from the back of his chair.

"In the folder, but the Professor has office hours until 8pm," Cullen said. Booth stood there for a second, not knowing what to say, or how to say it, but Cullen seemed to understand.

"Just go find the baby killing sonvabitch," he said with a strange gentleness. All Booth could do was nod.

* * *

"Brennan, do you have any idea what time it is?"

Did she? From the crimp in her back, it was probably late. Though, that was more indicative of time passing than a specific time of day. From the bottom of the stairs Angela sighed, telltale heels clicking loudly as she swiped her credentials and mounted the forensics platform.

"Who's this?" she asked softly, coming to a halt as a peripheral shadow. Brennan ran the pad of her index finger down the shallow curve of an ulna. Smooth and light, like the bones of a bird.

Chronic Anorexia Nervosa could deplete bone density, or Osteogenesis Imperfect. Even advancing age stripped calcium. It wasn't any of those, though. Dana's weight-to-height ratio had been within tolerance three months before she died, and there was no dental pitting to show her bones were congenitally brittle.

She set the bone down gently, picking up it's mirror match. Once, an eternity ago she had warned Zach against letting visual input trigger extra emotions. Chastising him for allowing the small size of a young victim to erode his objectivity. Too bad it wasn't as easy to brush aside sense memory. Tendons and flexors ready for the heft of a full grown bone.

"Dana Marquez," she told Angela. "I'm reexamining her remains."

"Why?"

Brennan might be ready to admit to herself that she was there to satisfy nothing more than hope. Like riffling through the same drawer for lost keys one more time. She was not, however, ready to admit that to Angela.

"Booth traced the financials from Theory-in-Motion," she finally gave the best answer she could. "The payments were made with a temporary credit card number, using a third-party website that allows people to give anonymously. He's trying to get a warrant for the websites records."

"So, Booth struck out, and now you're scrounging around for another lead?" Angela appeared to mull that over, and found it lacking. "Does Booth know you're here?"

"No. Why should he?"

From the look on Angela's face, _why _was something even a child should have understood, and Brennan felt the opening notes of irritation start to rise up.

"Angela, I don't need a protector, if that's what you're implying. First: I'm perfectly capable of defending myself. Second: I'm inside the lab, behind electronic locks and frequently patrolled by security personnel."

"Oh, would those be the same security guards that stole a skeleton and sold it to the highest bidder?"

"He didn't sell it to the highest bidder, he just sold it. Besides, that was a long time ago." She tried to rally, but Angela just crossed arms. An expression all by itself.

"Not the point, Brennan."

"What _is_ the point, then?"

"The point is that a month ago, Booth would have known where you were. He would have been here. Probably with food."

"I can feed myself, you know."

"Yeah," Angela said, and let the silence grow. It pressed against her back as she traded the ulna for a radius, the little click echoing between them.

"He went to dinner with Catherine. He's busy, that's all."

"Oh, that's all?"

The tone finally made her break away from the radius bone, surprised. The bite in those words had been real.

"What do you mean?" she asked, and the other woman sighed, piercing her with a distinct unease. "Ange . . . ?"

"Temperance Brennan. Are you seriously going to let this happen?"

The words raced through her like panic, heart accelerating against the cage of her ribs. She had no desire to talk about whatever _this _was. She had a feeling it would not be a subject she found comfortable.

"I just, Angela, I want to work," she finally got out. It sounded much weaker than she wanted, nearly trembling from the adrenaline surging through her muscles.

"Yeah," Angela said, fitting far too much disbelief into such a small word. Weight changing as she shifted to stand hipshot, arms still crossed. Nearly six feet of righteous immobility.

Brennan looked down at the bone in her hand. She was holding it too tightly. Fight or flight trying to turn it into a highly ineffective weapon. Dana Marquez had been kidnapped, killed, buried, exhumed, and set out for examination. The girl really didn't need anyone adding carelessness to the list. She set the bone down carefully.

"Look, Brennan," Angela went on, sounding softer, "you clearly don't want to talk about it, but I can tell something happened between you and Booth. I may not be a genius, but I've got cause and effect down pretty well. Two months ago Booth was waiting for you. Now he shows up in yesterday's clothes."

"Your right. I don't want to talk about it," Brennan said quickly, which was probably already too much of an admission.

"I only said that to give you a jumping off point, Bren. Because you? You are most definitely talking about it."

"Leave it alone, Ange," she warned. Then, surprisingly, kept right on talking. "Booth and I have been partners for five years. I know exactly what he needs."

"Oh, and what's that?"

"Normal," she said quickly, because she knew the answer to this. "Someone who believes in God, and marriage, and subsuming yourself in another person. Not. . .not someone who gets excited over finding children's graves." After that, there was silence. Brennan risked turning around, and found Angela watching her with an expression she almost couldn't stand.

"Oh, Brennan," Angela said, like her heart really had broken, and the world wavered liquidly. Brennan swallowed against it, remembering Booth's face crumpling in astonished pain as she pushed him back.

"That's what Booth needs," she said firmly, happy when her voice didn't tremble. "I'm his friend and thats what I want for him."

* * *

Daniel Spenser's office was in the middle of the Georgetown University library, and Booth was not in a good mood by the time he managed to find it. The door sagged open, and he rapped his knuckles before poking his head in.

Lucky day, there was a man inside. Propping up a tight cap of grey curls with one hand, the other holding a pen and moving across a sheet of paper. Booth cleared his throat and stepped in, but the man held up a stately hand.

"A moment, oh impassioned youth," and kept writing. So Booth looked around the office. Very quintessentially professor-ish. Decorated with teetering bookshelves, and on the wall, burnished in the low light, a silver star and a purple heart.

Booth was trying, and failing, to imagine the man into a uniform when the guy finally put down his pen and looked up. Surprise re-grooving the mobile lines of his face.

"No youth, you."

"Professor Spenser." Booth made it a statement.

"Yes?" the man answered, looking at him with an air of pleasant expectation. Booth gave him a good, hard look, but the guy just kept waiting.

"Special Agent Seeley Booth." He flipped his shield wallet, more for effect than any idea of challenge. The guy seemed too amused to want to protest.

"Shall you sit?" he asked, and Booth sat.

"Usually," the man began without any prompting, "my office hours are attended by the young and nubile, or the young and panicked." He considered for a beat. "Sometimes they are both at the same. Never, thus far, by an FBI special agent. It begs the question."

"Professor Spenser," Booth started, not totally sure what the hell the question was, but sure as hell wanting to regain control of whatever the hell was going on. The man just raised up a finger.

"With an ess," he said, "not a C," and Booth knew he was loosing the battle. Spenser smiled gently. "I like to clarify. Otherwise who knows what heights and blackguard deeds my ego would find in the confusion."

Booth stared. Spenser dropped his hand. "Spen-_c_er is a poet of fame, Spen-_s_er is a professor with sadly faded delusions of grandeur. But tell me," he leaned forward, "was it blackguard deeds that put it over the top?"

Booth just kept staring.

"Well, it couldn't have been heights. That's a very ordinary word," Spenser groused with a peevish aggrievement.

"You must be a real hit with the collage kids," Booth finally said. Spenser sat back and grinned like a man instead of a stage actor.

"I make them laugh, maybe they'll actually listen to what I'm saying."

"Does that work?" Booth asked, and the man shrugged again. It started at his toes, and worked all the way through to his shoulders and hands, making a mockery of his own disenchantment.

"Sometimes. If they haven't already fallen in love with the idea of tragedy."

"Do you know why I'm here?" Booth asked, deciding it was time for a redirect. Spenser folded his hands, the picture of attention.

"No."

"Do the names Samuel Klemm or Dana Marquez mean anything to you?" he asked, and watched carefully, waiting for that little tick to speak.

Spenser took the names in, making a concentrated study of the far wall as he considered them. They practically wrote themselves across his long, craggy face. Then he shook his head. "No."

"How about Hakim Spenser."

Without anyone moving, the atmosphere shifted. "My son," Spenser said evenly.

"Does he know Samuel Klemm or Dana Marquez?"

"Doubtful."

"Why's that?"

Spenser smiled but it had no humor, and the tick was trying to go, but something held it's pendulum. "Death be not proud, Agent Booth."

Simple as that, Booth knew. The medals on the wall, the star and the heart. Their solitude was not quiet pride, it was muffled sorrow. "Iraq?" Booth asked, thinking that dead children seemed to be chasing him everywhere.

"So we start in my house," Spenser said, "and end in yours. The poet and the solider."

"I'm a cop, now," Booth said, and the long fingered hands that had been folded fanned opened in generous appeasement.

"Of course, but perhaps you could tell me why you've come asking after Hakim."

"Because someone murdered at least two children, then used your son's name and your address to make donations in their name. We're trying to find out why."

"No doubt you are." Then he paused, and his hands laced together again. "I'm sorry. I can't help you. I don't know why Hakim's name is on those donation rolls."

"They were made to a company that specializes in treating psychiatric problems," Booth pushed, but those hands didn't budge.

"I don't know about that either."

"Anything you do know?"

"Many things, young Lochinvar, bought at great expense. However, I'm afraid you won't care for most of them." Spenser smiled again, and the tick of Booths lie detector muttered to itself in quiet confusion.

"How about anything relevant to this case?"

"Nothing."

He was lying. Booth was almost certain he was lying, but about what? Spenser wasn't telling, just sitting there calmly as Booth let the quite hum of the office overwhelm them both. Finally he reached for a card.

"If you think of anything, call me."

"Certainly," Spenser took the card, but Booth didn't let go. Leaning in a little, invading the personal space. "For Gallantry in Action," he quoted the inscription on the back of the little Silver Star. Spenser's eyes pinched against the pain, and Booth could feel them following him out. He managed to find his way back out of the labyrinth. Back to his truck. Back to square one; and if that wasn't commentary on his whole damn life lately, then he didn't know what was.

He drove, and ended up at Catherine's. Calling first, because surprise visits were only romantic once. After that, they were creepy. She was waiting for him. Barefoot, with a smile that went deep into her eyes. She sat next to him on the couch as he joked, making her laugh. Eventually, she curled into him, head resting on his shoulder. He put his arms around her.

"It's okay," she said. "Whatever it is, it will be okay. I've got you."

Sitting there, breathing her in, Booth felt the knot in his chest relax. He couldn't think of anything he wanted more than this.

* * *

A/N: Well folks, promotion boards were held last Friday, but the results are being held until the Secretary approves the selections. I could be a full Lieutenant very, very soon. Perish the though.

Oh, and, er, about the story: 13 chapters in total, so we're more than half way though. I'm kinda proud of the confrontation between Booth and Sweets. I think I did a good job. What say you, gentle reader?


	9. Chapter 9

The next morning started with a phone call.

Well, it started with a shower that swung from too hot to too cold under his inexperienced hands, and coffee that was too strong. The phone call was still plenty early, though. Buzzing against his hip while he was still fighting his way south from Silver Springs.

It was Professor Spenser, with an ess, wanting to meet.

"You meant to sting my pride last night," he told Booth, gesturing him into a chair at the miniature table. Around them commuters bustled. Picking up coffee and turnovers; putting off going to the office. "Implying that my son was a better man than myself."

"Did it work?" Booth asked.

"Oh, yes." Spenser smiled a little, and let it slide away. "I was not entirely honest with you last night. I let you believe my son died in war. He did not."

"So?" Booth made it neutral, but he could feel the tension coiling down low. Spenser allowed himself one last second of unhappy hesitation, then gave into the story.

"Hakim earned those medals in Iraq, but he came home safe. He walked off the plane, and I cried like a child because my child was safe. I couldn't see into his spirit, though. I didn't know how much of the damage was hidden until he had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, stopped living. I took him to the doctor, and he was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder."

Spenser gave him a quick glance, but Booth just sipped his coffee. He'd had his own demons to deal with. He wasn't going to grudge another guy's because it had a name on everyone's lips.

"The doctors and the pills seemed to help. He got better, and I started thinking we'd dodged a bullet, my son and I. Then two years ago, Hakim went into the garage, put a bucket over his head, and shot himself from under the chin."

Booth straightened up, put his coffee down. Met the guy's eyes, because things like that mattered. "I'm very sorry," he said.

Spenser weighed it, then he nodded. Around them, the commuters broke like waves.

"Mr. Spenser," Booth asked, ready for this to go either way, "did you make those donations?"

Spenser watched him, all the mobile lines on his face still. Then he shook his head. "No, but suspect I know who did."

"Who?"

"David Alexanders. My son's friend since grammar school."

"What makes you think that?"

Spenser shrugged. "Nothing more persuasive than phantom doubt. Besides myself, Davy loved Hakim the best. He took his suicide very hard."

"Those donations are linked to at least two murders." Booth said.

"I can't believe that David is capable of killing, but . . . ." Spenser looked down at his swirling coffee. Booth waited, head cocked like a dog that wanted to understand. He looked up to meet Booth's own eyes.

"I looked into my son's face thousands of times, Agent Booth. Hundreds of thousands. From the moment he was born until the day he shot himself in the head. Not once did I see death looking back at me."

"In other words: sometimes we're wrong," Booth gave the guy his due. Spenser gave him a smile that was mostly sorrow, but spiced with irony.

"You have a refreshing way of simplifying things. We could use you at the university."

"I like being a cop," Booth told him, but accepted the compliment. "You know where I can find David Alexanders?"

"Here." Spenser handed him a card. It listed an address in Bethesda, Maryland.

Half an hour later he finally made it downtown to pick Bones up. Ha...okay, no. Bad turn of phrase.

To fetch Bones? No, to freaking English.

Rendezvous. Rendezvous would work. It was perfectly fucking French. Who knew what it really meant.

Standing just out of view of Brennan's fishbowl windows, Booth stopped. Grimacing at his own brain, and smoothing a hand down his tie. Across the lab, Angela caught him at it. She treated him to a long, cool evaluation, like she could see through him, and did not find him impressive. He squinted back at her, and she raised one perfect eyebrow.

Booth broke her gaze, because he wanted to, and strode casually into Bones' office. Where she stood, talking to the other half of the Hodgelastic dynamic duo.

Bones and Hodgins broke off whatever they had been talking about to give him the eyeball. He used their silence to give Bones a run down of seeing Cullen, his double encounter with Professor Spenser, and the new theories about David Alexanders, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Medicine, currently working as a researching for the National Institute of Health.

"Wow, NIH," Hodgins said with intensely blue-eyed interest. If he and Bones ever got together, they'd make babies that would give Hitler the willies. "So, are you gonna go put the squeeze on him?"

"Why are you here?" Booth asked, eyeing the guys rumpled lab-coat, and hair that looked capable of supporting insect life. Angela had said he wasn't sleeping, and wow, he looked it.

"Dude," Hodgins protested. "I'm giving Dr. B an update on stabby things."

"Did he find it?" Booth turned to ask Bones, who shook her head.

"Hey," Hodgins griped, but Booth just pointed to the door.

"Time to go, bug-boy."

Hodgins grumbled, but he went. Except now Bones was giving him the same blue-eyed evaluation. Willies. Definitely the willies.

"So, are we going to put the squeeze on him?" she asked, but she did it while switching from lab, to outdoor coat, so Booth tried to cool his jets. It wasn't easy though. The sourness in his veins wanted to just keep rolling.

"No, we're going to go ask him some questions about his good friend Hakim."

"So, we're going to be sneaky about putting the squeeze on him?" she clarified, smiling at him as she flipped her hair out from underneath her collar. Booth couldn't help but smile back.

"Yeah, Bones. We're being sneaky about it."

Despite the good start, she sat silent for the entire car ride. Looking out the side window, wearing an expression he'd bet money she wasn't aware of.

"Everything okay?" He asked.

"Yes," she told the buildings sliding by.

"Okay, cause, usually you're talking my ear off here."

He was paying attention to traffic, but he didn't miss way she squared her shoulders before looking at him. Shaking something off.

Once, he would have pressed her. Nibbled and niggled until she gave in, with a smile, or without. Now, now he didn't know how to start. It all felt incredibly overwhelming, and it was too late anyway. She was looking at him again, everything extraneous tucked away.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't get much sleep last night."

"Ahhh," he said knowingly, tapping his temple. Trying to lightening whatever heavy thing had snuck in. "Couldn't get the gerbils to stop?"

Bones stared at him, a crinkle between her brows. "I find you very strange," she told him.

He slid his eyes sideways, waggling his eyebrows. She looked sideways back, but she gave into a little smile.

"I didn't get much sleep because I spent last night reexamined Dana Marquez' remains."

"And?" he asked cautiously. He hadn't realized she'd stayed so late.

"And," she sighed, glancing down. "I found nothing. If the killer really is this Alexanders, he's good." She looked back up. "He's really, very good."

"Well, that why we're going to catch him, because you and I, we're the best." For whatever reason, it was the right thing to say, because Bones gave him a full on grin. Her closed off feeling eased, and Booth relaxed his grip on the steering wheel.

"By squeezing him," she said, some satisfaction sparking deep behind her eyes. Like maybe they really would beat the crap out of the guy.

"Yup," Booth agreed.

Once they got to the Hoover, he installed Bones in the observation room, and continued on to the interrogation side. Sitting in a chair, his quarry looked very average. Average height, average build, average dark hair.

"Mr. Alexanders," he said, shutting the door firmly and smoothing his tie as he sat. "I'm Agent Booth. Thanks for coming in. Sorry about the accommodations, but all the conference rooms are full."

Behind him, Bones would be frowning over the lie. For all that she'd just told him to use psychological warfare, she probably had no clue how it worked.

"Doctor Alexanders," he corrected.

"Sorry," Booth apologized. Alexanders just blinked at the far wall. Booth thought he could probably hear the ticking of the clock in the other room.

"So, uh, did the escorting Agent give you the heads up?" He made the question jaunty, and showing lots of teeth. Contrasting the implied threat of the interview room with a non-judgmental demeanor increased, rather than decreased feelings of discomfort. At least that was Sweets' ten league explanation for having to sit there while some asshole smiled at you while he dangled the other shoe.

He tried to ease the muscles between his shoulders. Sweets was a whole 'nother topic. Across from him, Alexanders had conceded to one very faint forehead wrinkle.

"Heads up?" he asked.

"Tell you why we wanted you to come down."

"No."

O-kay. Booth looked his suspect over. Alert, but he seemed to have a hard time keeping his eyes on Booth. They kept flicking away. The only action on the guys otherwise stiff face. It wasn't fear, though. It was something else.

"Well," he said once the silence had dragged to discomfort, "we're looking into a string of identity thefts."

"I haven't had anything stolen," Alexanders told him, loosing the eye battle. Looking straight at the far wall, giving the impression he was talking to it as well.

"Hakim Spenser," Booth said, and felt a mean little satisfaction when Alexanders pinched in towards himself.

"Hakim is dead," Alexanders finally said. Something in his voice, something, but Booth couldn't tell what. He didn't like it.

"I want to know why you had me brought here," he demanded, all the arrogance that had ever existed inside Bones coming out in that single sentence. Booth felt his teeth try to lock together.

"We're just trying to figure out what's going on," he said. "Someone's using Hakim Spenser's name to make donations to charitable foundations."

"Why are you investigating? Isn't that a job for the Fraud Squad?"

"Well, you know, those guys, they rhyme" Booth told him, but Alexanders just stared at him. Didn't even sully himself with that awesome mix of exasperation and puzzlement the other squints, his squints, were always giving him.

"Look, we brought you in to see if you had any insight into who might have had access to Hakim's personal information. His dad said you were his best friend."

"I don't know any of Hakim's other friends."

"Right," Booth muttered to himself, watching the cannon ball of flattery bounce off the castle wall.

"You're a neurologist?" he picked a topic at random.

"Yes, with the National Institute of Health."

"What do you do there?" Routine filler question, but Alexanders creased his forehead into the same faint wrinkle and sighed huffily through his nose.

"You wouldn't understand. May I go now?"

"No," Booth snapped. He cleared his throat, and tried again. "No, I'm sorry, but I still have a few more questions. It's very important we find out what's going on."

"Why?"

Booth made a grab for his temper, but he still slapped the pictures down too hard. One of the pale haired Sam, one with Dana wearing a conical party hat. "Those donations charged to Hakim's card were made in the names of these two kids, just after someone murdered them."

"The death of children is always regrettable," Alexanders leaned to study the pictures. Booth tried to read whatever small messages were in the timber and pitch of his voice, but there was nothing.

"Anything you can do to help," Booth probed, but Alexanders shrugged.

"I'm sorry, I don't know them."

Booth watched him watch the photos, waiting for the predator to peek out. The dark slithery thing that been inside Howard Epps, and Kevin Hollings. Inside every single baby killing sonvabitch since the monkey picked up the stick and howled about it.

There was nothing. The monster wasn't hiding, or peeking, or even whiffling through the tulgey wood. Just nothing. Booth clearing his throat against his own unease. Picking up a piece of paper, just so he wouldn't have to look at the guy. "It says here that Hakim joined the Army at twenty-seven. That's kinda late to enlist. Was he chasing trouble?"

"Are you implying Hakim was running from some kind of problem?"

Booth just looked at him.

"Hakim didn't enlist to avoid jail. He did it because he lived according to the dictates of his own conscious," Alexanders told him, sounding a little spun up for the first time.

"What do you mean?"

"Hakim thought every citizen has a moral obligation to serve the greater good, each according to their individual conscious and abilities. He thought his obligation was to serve."

Jesus, it pinched. Why couldn't Hakim been like all those other swinging dicks? Signing on the dotted line to get laid, coming out with some sense of duty and a good future. Instead he'd signed for duty, and ended up on a slab.

"Except he went there, and it wasn't about glory, or fairness or serving humanity. It was about trying to hold back the rain and moping up chunks of people. There was no greater good, and it ended up killing him."

"Yes," Alexanders said, voice far away. "He couldn't take that." Then he blinked, and the window was shut again. Too quick to understand what was beyond. "Why do you want to know these things?"

"Just trying to collect all the information we can. You never know when something will drop into place," Booth said, stuffing the pictures back into the folder.

"I'm sure," Alexanders said, standing up, but shying away from the hand Booth offered. "Am I free to go?"

"Yeah, the Agent outside the door will escort you down. Thanks for taking the time to come in," Booth said, but Alexanders was already striding briskly down the hall. Like he couldn't wait to get back to all those pickled brains, or something.

So Booth went back to Observation, and of course goddamn Sweets was there, trying to hide behind Bones. Seeing him made something try to pulse behind one of Booth's eyes.

"Agent Booth," the kid started, but Booth just rode over the top of him.

"Shut up," he snarled, not even caring about Bones reproachful look. "Just tell me what the hell's wrong with that guy."

()

"Oh," Sweets said, and looked at his feet.

Brennan looked at him a little more closely, puzzled. He had looked strange when he'd first showed up. Poking his head through the door and giving the room at large a rapid look before he came in. She'd snapped at him over the lozenge of light that had obscured the purposefully darkened one-way mirror. He'd shuffled in with apologies, darting little looks into the corners. Now he looked equally discomforted, his posture was very reminiscent of the omega in a wolf pack.

"He, uh, he appears to be suffering from flattened affect," Sweets stopped cringing. "That's what Agent Booth assesses, the intuition he calls his gut reactions," he told them, gaining assurance. "He's actually reading micro-expressions. Very small changes in expression, that happen extremely quickly. Most people can't pick up on them, but the ones who can are unusually adept at detecting lies."

"Okay, what about it?" Booth demanded, arms still crossed.

"Dr. Alexanders doesn't seem to have any. That's why you found him so alien."

"Why."

"Lots of things can cause blunted affect. Traumatic brain injury, Schizophrenia, a sensory processing disorder. I can't possibly diagnose him based on one ten-minute interview performed by someone else." Sweets managed to scrape up some indignation.

Underneath his jacket, Brennan saw Booth's muscles swell. Fighting the urge to hit. Instead he just reached out and gripped the lapel of Sweets jacket, towing him rapidly towards the door.

"Why don't you go spend some time figuring it out," Booth said, propelling the slighter man outside. Sweets tried to whirl, but Booth firmly closed the door in his face.

"Why are you being so mean to him?" Brennan demanded. Suddenly out of patience with whatever secret thing was making Sweets and Booth exchange hostilities.

In the door way, Booth sucked a couple breaths, and shrugged his jacket back down. "It's nothin', Bones," he told the door, and she didn't need his expression, micro or macro to tell he was lying. "Just, let it go, okay?"

"Did you have a fight with Catherine?" she asked. Trouble with personal relationships could often spill over into professional life. It didn't sound like Booth, but she hadn't had many opportunities to observe him while he was in a relationship.

"Of course not," he muttered, apparently to himself. Then, louder: "No, I did not have a fight with Catherine," in that pedantic tone that meant she'd annoyed him. She felt her own ire rising. She hadn't done anything wrong.

"I don't understand what's going on," nor did she particularly like the plaintive tone in her own voice, but it seemed to make Booth soften.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you. There's nothing going on; just a tough case."

He had on his conciliatory smile. The one that crinkled the edges of his eyes and softened the lines of his mouth. Brennan felt it working into her irritation, trying to dissolve it. She fought against it. She opened her mouth to demand he tell her what was going on, but instead the door slammed open, and Caroline Julien steamed in.

"Seeley Booth!" she barked. "What the hell is this?"

"Caroline!" Booth yelped, trying to move behind Brennan, same as Sweets had done earlier. She rolled her eyes, and stepped aside. The woman wasn't that imposing, nor did she feel particularly sheltering right now.

"It's a request for a search warrant," Booth said in an extremely reasonable voice.

"Exactly what kind of stupid are you?" Caroline demanded, thrusting a paper at the unshielded Booth. He shot Brennan a betrayed look, but Caroline just rattled the paper in his face.

"On this warrant, did you list any physical evidence?"

"No, but - "

"Shut up. What about eye witnesses, did you list anyone who picked the suspect out of a line up?"

"No," Booth ground out, and Brennan felt he'd probably suffered enough. Even when she and Russ had been fighting, they had known when to present a united front.

"Booth is very certain it's him. I've come to trust his instincts with these sort of things. He's very reliable," she told the other woman. Booth beamed at her, but instead of being reassured, Caroline's glower deepened.

"Oh, you're certain it's him?" she asked, and Brennan realized that she'd mis-stepped.

"It's him, Caroline," Booth defended them both, re-drawing Caroline's bead.

"Well, never mind then," she said, an about-face that Brennan was fairly certain was really sarcasm. "We'll just go tell the judge that Seeley Booth is sure this guy is guilty. He'll be locked up before dinner." Caroline slapped the papers against Booths pectorals. He gave a little woof, and cradled them automatically.

"Find me some evidence," she ordered them, spinning on a heel and leaving. Brennan watched her stride off. Beside her, Booth clutched the now disorganized papers against his chest. He looked unapproachable, entire body hard and alien. Looking down, he shuffled the papers together, setting them on the table. Then he slammed his fist against the wall.

"Booth!" She rushed in, even before the blood from his split knuckle had started to well. He let her cradle his hand.

"You could break a knuckle, doing that," she admonished him, probing underneath where the skin had split.

"Jeeze, Bones," he hissed, yanking his hand free and glaring. "That fucking hurts!"

She let her hands drop, feeling a dangerous disregard for consequences that used to rise up so often. It felt good. "Why are you so _mad_."

Booth clutched his hand to his chest, his expression layered with things she'd never, never be able to parse. "Booth?" she asked softly, everything that had been anger abruptly draining away into something that felt hollow inside her chest. "What?"

"Bones, just let it go, okay?" he said again, blood blooming on his shirt, reproach in his voice. She took a step back.

"Sorry," she apologize, horrified at the awkwardness that had engulfed them. Horrified by the realization that was washing over her. He tried to say something, but she fled. Back to the lab, with its reassuringly straight lines, and contained things.

Angela was standing at Jack's lab bench when she walked in. Leaning against his back and watching as he carefully pipetted liquid into a vial. They both looked up when at the doors whooshing open. Hodgins eye sockets were smudged dark, but Angela's face felt as unknowable as Booth's had been. Making an assessment she couldn't understand.

Across the quiet space, Brennan shook her head, hardly understanding what she was negating. There was no evidence, no progress on the case. There was also no longer any touching, no sharing of secrets. On his stool, Jack slumped and looked away, but Brennan was the one who broke Angela's gaze.


	10. Chapter 10

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

A/N: Sorry folks. I finally realized this site was eating the asterisks I was using to show point of view shifts. I fixed the problem in this, and all previous chapters. Things should flow a little better now.

* * *

**Chapter 10**

In the darkness, the bedroom celling seemed to glow. _Hung in ethereal light below the moon_, Jack's brain quoted. He squeezed his eyes shut and told it to shut up.

He'd been staring at the stupid celling for days. Nights. Whatever. Memorizing the dead spider, and the crack that looked like a pig's head. Tonight, something inside was trying to grind forward. Hours and minutes and the slow drift of continents jelling.

"Sodium thiopental," he whispered to dimly visible bedroom ceiling. Beside him, a pillow groaned. He gave it a poke.

"Oh my god, the NIH and Sodium thiopental!" he told it, sitting up. The pillow made a sincere swipe for his nuts, but didn't calculate for movement. Grazing his thigh as he arced a flea-like parabola out of bed. Gone.

"Fuck puppies," spake the pillow.

Angela resisted for a full ten minutes, trying to burrow back into sleep. Then she threw the pillow across the room and went downstairs.

"Hodgins, seriously, what the fuck?" Jack, now mercifully wearing his undies, looked up from the computer, his face bathed in it's cool blue glow. Angela winced. No one looked good by computer light at two in the morning. Least of all her pasty pale, clearly-a-crazy-person husband.

"Lethal injection," he told her.

"Jack," she said back slowly, "if you don't start making sense sometime within the next 10 seconds, I'm going to drown you like a kitten."

Hodgins blinked, and focused. "Really?"

"Yes," she said, then smiled pretty. Hodgins laughed, a little nervous, but no longer lost.

"Yeah. So. Lethal injection, usually done with a three drug cocktail, right? Sodium thiopental to induce rapid coma, Pancuronium bromide to paralyze, and Potassium chloride to stop the heart."

"Okay," Angela agreed heavily. Locating a chair and knuckling under to the inevitability of a conversation about the death penalty at 2:18 a.m.

"Well, in 2009 Ohio started using a single dose method, using - "

"Sodium thiopental," Angela filled in, feeling something try to spark down her backbone.

"Bingo. Followed closely but Washington State. Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee; the list goes on. All based on a study of the drugs effectiveness conducted by, guess who," he pointed towards the NIH logo emblazoned across the top of the screen.

"Hodgins, did you just discover a clue?" Angela asked, and Jack grinned. Overpowering the dark circles under his eyes for the first time in days. Shaking off something bottomless, something that had begun to frighten her.

"Yeah," he said, "I think I did."

"Well," Angela stood, holding out a hand to her hansom husband, "I think we should go boff our brains out until it's a reasonable hour. Then we should call Booth."

"Yeah?" Jack asked in an entirely different tone, letting her pull him up.

()

"Zero order what?" Booth whispered fiercely into the dark. From the sighing and pillow shuffling on the other side of the bed, he'd put too much into the fierce. Booth soothed an apologetic hand over Catherine's shoulder, trying to make sense of whatever Hodgins thought couldn't wait until a decent hour.

"Kinetics," Hodgins said, with that little amp in his voice that came when he was excited. "It means a drug's decrease in concentration is linear, instead of geometric. Which means a drug with ZoK will be extremely long lasting in the body. Which makes it good for killing people real dead."

"Hodgins," Booth finally asked, rubbing at the bone ridges above his eyes in tempo with his heartbeat. "Is this actually important?"

"It's interesting," Hodgins said, "but I'll give you the condensed version. All you need to know is: if Alexanders works at the NIH campus, then he has access to Sodium thiopental."

"Still not enough for a probable cause," Booth said.

"Since when do we worry about warrants?" Hodgins asked. "I thought we were more about rushing in, guns blazing."

"Since Caroline went all ninja on _our _ass," Booth said, and from the silence on Hodgins end, that was explanation enough.

"Well, now you know," Hodgins told him, sounding suddenly strained. Or distracted. In the background, someone giggled, and Booth realized that the guy was most definitely not in the lab. Booth snapped his phone closed before he could get an earful of whatever was going on.

"You have to leave?" Catherine mumbled into her pillow. Booth smiled.

"No. Just an update."

"It's three-fifty a.m."

"Yeah, well, squints; they get excited, they think everyone else should be too." He spooned into her; she grumbled, but pressed her spine into him. A beautiful, unknowable cat. He gathered her hair aside and kissed the hard point behind her ear.

"G'way, to early."

"Never too early," he kissed the turn of her jaw, sliding a hand down her belly, fingertips just below the elastic of her PJ pants. She whined, squashing her face into the pillow and jerking his hand back out. Lacing her fingers through his and pressing their joined hands to her own chest.

Booth sighed sadly. To early apparently really did mean to early.

"What's wrong?" she asked, voice matching the bedrooms hush, not trying to turn over. In her grasp, his split knuckle stung.

He pressed his forehead into the curve of her neck and said: "Nothing."

At four-forty three he gave up. Extricating himself from Catherine's entanglement, and headed for the gym. Lats and traps and push. Until his teeth were skimmed out in a snarl. Until something finally gave way and he crashed to his knees. Squat bar clanging on the stops, and the soccer mom's glaring.

"Awright?" the towel guy asked, vee-tapered and acned. Booth made it to his feet, hands braced on his knees as be blew for air, sweat plocking onto the mat.

"Yeah," he wheezed, holding up a warding hand. "I'm good."

"Sure," the infant said, "just take a minute."

Booth torqued around to crane up at him. "Hey, you know, I've been doing this a helluva of a lot longer than you."

"Sure," towel guy said again, smiling with perfect teeth. "I could tell."

Later, he inched his way through Gate 1 of the Washington Navy Yard, armed with nothing more deadly than a DMV photo of Daniel John Alexanders. Watching the soldier-straight set of Marine Captain Toby Hadley's shoulders as she looked at it. The hard square of her jaw when she handed it back.

He drove to the Hoover, and listened to Charlie tell him there were cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die absolutely no connections between Alexanders, and any of the victims.

He climbed the stairs to Cullen's office with an update of no progress, and stood silent as the man looked steadily at the wall.

He returned to his office, and found Angela standing in front of the door.

"Hey there studly. Did you know that we have a lunch date?" She asked, leaning against the door jam, wearing something that probably should have looked really terrible, but somehow didn't. He thought about the last six hours, and said, "No we don't."

"Oh, yes, we do," she said, looking sharper and not budging.

He crossed his arms, and breathed sharply out his nose. "Look, Angela. I'm busy. I've got about eight tons of stuff to go over, and I'm not having what you'd call a good day. So why don't you just tell me what this is about."

Angela's eyebrows went right up to the ceiling. Her high heels made slow clicks towards him, and when she got close, his collar got a size too tight. Inside the confessional, he might have admitted that his shorts did, too.

"Lunch, Booth. Now. Before I do something drastic."

"Okay, okay." He darted a glance around the bullpen, picking up the peripheral flick of heads turning their way. "Just, lets go. Alright?"

They walked over to the Diner in silence, and Booth waited until they had food in front of them before pushing. "All right, Angela. Here we are, having lunch. Food and everything." Which was, of course, when she started looking worried.

He popped a french fry in his mouth. "Don't even think of backing out of whatever this is, because if you do, I'll tell Cam about how you played hooky."

"It's not school, Booth. We can leave museum grounds for lunch." She gave him a little narrow eyed look, but it got her over whatever hump she was stuck on. Yippie skippy for him.

"It's about Brennan."

He carefully loaded a fry with ketchup. "Uh huh."

Angela chewed on her lip for a second, then took the plunge. "You know, before you came, she didn't have any friends. Not really."

"She had you," he said, but she waved it away.

"She always will, but what we are talking about here is the fact that Brennan can't make friends. She doesn't know how."

"What they hell are you talking about, Angela? People are always after Bones. She's famous, she's beautiful, and she's rich." He stabbed a fry in her direction, not bothering to keep the circling frustration out of his voice. "None of which she's shy about telling people."

"No, Booth," Angela said with that drawl people got when they're about to point out how you're dumber than a box of rocks. "Those are not friends. Those are people who want something from her. I'm talking about the people who givith without out taketh-ing, and make sure to take your shoes off when you're drunk."

"Fine." He shoved another fry into a puddle of ketchup. Anything to keep from having to look at her. "Are those the same people who defend your honor and don't talk about you behind your back?" Then he dropped the fry, because some pointy bit of Angela's shoe was suddenly resting very gently on his, ah, area.

"I trust your attention is now focused?" she asked, malice bright and cheerful. He nodded.

"Good. Now, something is going on between you two. I don't know what, and as much as it pains me to say, I don't need to know. All I wanted to say is; if you drop her like a high school asshole, you'll suffer for it."

In his seat, Booth contemplated whether he should laugh, or just start crying. He tried to shift away from the stiletto currently pressing into his junk, but she followed. "Angela," he said in his most reasonable voice "I'm not abandoning Bones because of Catherine."

"You know, Booth," she finally said after a long, stink-eyed pause. "I almost believe you."

"I'm not going anywhere Ange. Besides, she's got you. Your not exactly nothing."

"No," she agreed, and miraculously put her fucking foot back on the floor, "but I chose Brennan, not the other way around. How many people are going to do that?"

He cleared his throat, weirdly stuck between wanting to run away and being incredibly fascinated. "You think Bones chose me?"

Angela gave him one last look, complex and not necessarily fond. After she left, he sat, thinking. Watching his french fries congeal, waving off the waitress each time she asked him if he wanted more water, some coffee, _any pie to day, hon?_

He intercepted Luz Marquez outside her fourth-grade classroom. Darkened and abandoned by the children that must be a constant reminder of her own lost daughter. He watched her look at Daniel Alexander's photo, and wondered if the reminder was pleasure, or pain.

She shook her head, and handed it back. He tucked it into a pocket, checking another box off Caroline's list. Pleasure, he decided, and pain. Both, at once.

()

This time, she got to the restaurant first. Letting the Maitre d' slip the coat off her shoulders, following him over to a bar stool. Feeling the butterfly brush of eyes skimming across the satin of her dress.

Once upon a time, that would have made her angry. A few years before that, she would have used it as evidence of her self worth. Today it just was, an atmospheric pressure that swirled around her, neither loved nor hated.

She smiled into the mirror mounted behind the liquor bottles, enjoying the balance. Hard fought and well earned. Not to be screwed with. She caught sight of him as soon as he came through the door. The rumple of his overcoat, and the tentative twisting as he scanned for her.

"Hey, babe," his greeting was both breath in her hair, and a rumble through her back. It made the bubble of anticipation that lived in her stomach wobble, and she tipped her head back into the shallow bowl of his shoulder, smelling soap and aftershave.

Sitting in the tall bar stool, their heads were nearly level, and she could feel the freshly shaved-off whiskers poking. In the mirror, fatigue clung to him. Showing in a way he'd probably mask if they were face to face.

"Hello," she told him, and the crinkling of his smile almost made her believe the tiredness had been her imagination. It did make her twist around and nod to the short man that was now aggrievedly hovering behind his shoulder. "You made the Maitre d' angry."

He rolled his eyes a little, implying that real men ignored Maitre d's on general principle, but he surrendered his coat and even attempted meekness as they were lead to a table.

She smiled. He wasn't very good at meek.

"How was your day?" she asked once they had been left alone, and it should have been an easy question. It should not have required that little second of preparation he gave himself by lingering over the menu. She let him have it.

"Oh," he said, an easy shrug and an easy smile. Water, backs, ducks; all similar things. "You know, the usual. Help the good, foil the bad."

She laughed, and asked if he'd managed to fit in helping any little old ladies across the street. Why not? The anticipation pulsed quicksilver down her nerves, but he was still funny, and sweet, and right now he was focusing all his startling attention on her. Right now still felt good. Later could happen later.

()

Later, he realized it had been a set up.

He didn't talk about his childhood. Never sat down to swap stories 'bout the birthday he spent in the ER, or how the cops knew his parents place by heart. It just didn't happen, and eventually, speculation became legend. Some Roughneck swearing on a stack of bibles that Sarge had actually sprung fully formed from the forehead of the United States Army. Belly tight, and rifle at the ready.

Tonight just didn't feel dangerous, though. With her chin propped on a hand, and those eyes right on him. She asked about his first crush, and he answered.

Then Catherine leaned across the table, and pushed her fingers through his hair, trailing down to his jaw. "So, who was it who broke your heart?"

Suddenly, horrifyingly, he felt the harsh prick of tears. "Catherine," he started, but he had no idea how to finish, and she didn't make him.

"It's okay. You don't have to tell me, but Seeley, this thing we have, it doesn't have much momentum." She steeled herself for whatever was next. "You haven't allowed it much momentum." Even delivered kindly, it stung hard, mostly because it was undeniable true.

"I'm not asking for a ring, or even a drawer, but I need to know." She pressed her lips together, gathering courage around herself. "Are you ever going to love me? I mean really love me?"

He thought of her smile. The exact crook of it, and the way her eyelids would fluttering as he pushed inside her. The line of her throat as her head fell back in pleasure. Thought of how those things should already feel like a sweet ache in his chest; and how they did not. He answered the only way he could.

"No."

Her face crumpled, just for an instant, before she caught control. "Oh, you honest bastard," she whispered, looking out across the dining room to hide the tears. He swallowed hard against the lump in his own throat.

"I'm sorry. Catherine, I'm so sorry."

She sighed, looking back at him. "I know. That's what really sucks. You're a good guy, Seeley. The best kind of guy, and we could have gone on having a good time together, but I. . .I'm looking for something more."

"I'm wasting your time," he gave the harsher translation, but her eyes went a little softer, this one last time.

"No. You're not anybody's waste of time. I hope someday your difficult doctor friend can realize that." Which just made him choke up all over again. She sighed again, with more pain, and more resolve. She stood up, kissed him on the cheek, and was gone.

Eventually the Maitre d' glared him out into the parking lot. He walked to his truck, and found Sweets leaning against the quarter panel. It didn't feel surprising. It felt inevitable, and maybe, Booth acknowledged way far down, maybe just a little warm.

He hit the unlock button twice, and Sweets, with a flare of hope he didn't bother damping, climbed inside.

"Sweets," Booth said slowly, not sure how much he really cared, but feeling obligated to at least token protest, "what the hell are you doing here?"

"I had Agent Fornelle track the GPS in your phone," Sweets told him, taking the question as literally as possible. "He owed me, for talking to his daughter about safe sex so he didn't have to."

Booth snorted, unimpressed, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sweets quick little grin. It looked brave, and sad, and wistful, all at once. All the complicated things life could be.

"Catherine broke up with me," Booth told the windshield.

"I'm sorry," Sweets said.

"I love Bones," he added, because this still felt a little unreal. Like it was a dream, and there could never, ever be any consequences.

"I know," the other man said gently, and suddenly Booth knew how a twenty-three year old might have become a psychologist in the first place. How he might have spent the last few years grown into a really good one.

"Why'd you lie, Sweets?" he asked, softly. In his own seat, Sweets sighed heavily, but he didn't look away.

"I could see that you were going to tell her you loved her. After the brain tumor. I could tell."

For the first second he didn't understand. Then he did, and it made him feel something that treaded the thin line between gratefulness and a blue electric rage.

They made a triangle. He and Bones and Sweets. Weird, and annoying, _really _annoying, but still three balanced points. No one standing on the edges looking in. "You almost ruined my life because you were jealous?"

"We all get afraid, Booth. Run into walls and do stupid things. I've just proved to you that psychologists aren't immune."

He laughed, and wondered if he could stop. Stopped, and wondered if he was about to cry. Drug a hand down his face, and found it dry. "Jesus, Sweets."

"Will we be okay?" Sweets asked. Booth squeezed the steering wheel. Gripped it until his knuckles burned.

It was night. He was tired. He knew he was going to do it anyway.

* * *

A/N: Again, pretty proud of the Booth, Angela interaction. Whadda youse guys think?


	11. Chapter 11

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 11**

Booth was racing the sun. Chasing a scrap of paper, extra crumpled from spending nearly six years stuffed into his glove box. Behind him the sky washed a brilliant pink, but he only saw it when he stopped for coffee and a pee.

The door he ended up at was basic and brown. It resonated solidly under his knuckles, and was opened by one very large guy. Earth mover hands, a farmers tan, and a suspicious look.

"Mr. Cooper?"

"Yes?"

"I'm FBI Agent Seeley Booth. I'd like to talk with you."

"What about?"

"Temperance Brennan," he said, and watched the guy's face. Surprise chased anger, before it settled into a hard blankness.

"Invite me in, Mr. Cooper," Booth insisted, and with that same hard look, Cooper jerked the door wide. The house was decorated in masculine functional. Hung with architectural elevations, and the couch at a perfect right angle to the rugs. At one point a wife had probably softened it, but she was gone now, just like the kids.

"What do you want?" Cooper asked, rubbing a hand against the worn knee of his jeans.

"Answers."

Cooper's hands stilled, looking at the floor with that closed expression and a rigid set to his shoulders. Booth flipped open a file folder, pretending to read a summary he knew by heart.

"Judah Morris Cooper. Born October 1952. Graduated from Amherst College in 1974. Married in 1977. Authorized as a foster parent in 1989. Charged with aggravated battery of a minor in 1993. Plead guilty and was charged with six years imprisonment by Judge Atticus Smith of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois. Served 3 years, 7 months, and 11 days before being paroled. Sentence completed July 12, 1999.

"Applied for and received restoration of voting rights, July 13, 2004. Moved to West Virginia in 2006. Did not apply for, and has not received restoration of the right to bear arms. Barred from further guardianship of foster children, ad infinitum."

He looked up. "Awfully civil minded there; 5 years to the day. Did you get your drivers license on your sixteenth birthday?"

Cooper swallowed, but he wouldn't look, and he wouldn't speak. Looking at the floor like a child being shamed. Booth felt it pulse inside his head, because this was so much more than spilled milk. This was five years. It was _I know who you are _and _I trust you_ and it was her hands shoving him away. It was her fucking creation myth, and he, Seeley Booth, was going to have it.

"You're going to want to work with me, here," he said, letting the gap of his jacket and the butt of his gun be the guarantee. Cooper glanced at the holstered gun, then away. Slumping with something that was more resignation than fear.

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know why."

"Why?" Cooper snorted an incredulous little laugh. "I've paid my debt to society, Agent Booth. I don't owe you why."

Problem was, he was right. Booth had no right to demand this story, and no right to own it. Didn't matter though. He'd come here for a story, he wasn't leaving without it. That was nothing but a simple truth.

"You'll give it to me." Booth said, and knew to his very osteons this, also, was a simple truth. Cooper clenched his jaw, and went back to saying nothing. So Booth filled it in for him.

"You wanted to save her. Like you saved those other kids. You were good at it. They gave you plaques, and everything. World's Best Foster Dad."

"I was her last chance," Cooper said. "She'd been kicked out of three other foster homes. The state was talking about putting her in a group home. It was me, or nothing.

"Her social worker dropped her off. Didn't even come in for coffee, just dumped her on the porch. She came inside, and after that we were at war. She didn't want join any sports teams, didn't want to eat with us at the table, didn't see the reason in doing her chores. The only thing she wanted was her books, and I was enemy number one for telling her there was more in the world."

Booth tried to imagine his partner sixteen years ago. Tall and thin. Wary about the eyes, and yes, very angry. Moving around the edges of life, refusing to meet anyones eyes. The image didn't have a hard time forming.

"She'd talk about a friend, which gave Susan and I a little hope. Then I found out her so-called friend was the 50 year old school janitor. I told her she was definitely going to summer camp, with kids her own age, and not to see that guy anymore. She looked at me, and smashed the balsa model of the first house I designed.

"My wife wanted to give up after she broke a girl's jaw in gym class, but I said no. A couple weeks later her social worker came for dinner, to evaluate the situation, and Temperance flipped the table over half way though. Broke all the dishes and left us wearing the mashed potatoes.

"The Department of Children and Family Services called the next day, saying that she needed a more controlled environment. That I was still a great foster parent, but couldn't save them all. She was in the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes, but she could hear me out in the living room, and I could hear her smash another dish. I lost it."

"Lost it," Booth said. Cooper locked his eyes, turning honesty into an almost weapon.

"I grabbed her by the hair and slapped her. Then I locked her in the trunk of my 1963 Cadillac Eldorado Brougman and left her there for two days. Until my wife came home from a business trip and wanted to know where she was."

"That's how. I want to know why," Booth snapped.

"Because," Cooper shot back. "She was destructive, and insolent, and infuriating. Because she was weak, and I was strong. Because she hurt my pride. For all the boring, trite, ordinary reasons." His breath was sharp, and his hands were balled up into fists. Booth felt something rise up in his throat. Anger. Fury. His own fingers clamping into fists.

She'd been defiant. So young. Just twenty-six, and already a doctor three times over. Running a department for the one of the most prestigious research institutes in the world. Wearing jeans and kung fu chopping anyone who got in her way. Walking fast and talking fast, mostly right over him. Smiling at the things she found worthy.

Now she wore things his whole paycheck couldn't pay for and shoes that required slowness. She smiled at things she'd been told were important, and she looked at him before she spoke.

She had changed and changed and changed, and they had stood in a circle, shaking their heads, telling her she was standing still. It was his fault. _His _fault. He'd done what even Judah Cooper and two days in the trunk of a car couldn't accomplish.

"Fuck," he said. Comprehensive and all-consuming. Cooper eyed him, and he realized for the first time that he was not going to beat the crap out of the man.

"I have to go," he said, spinning a perfect right-about, but Cooper held out a hand, and for the first time there was something like sorrow in his eyes.

"Wait." Booth paused, back to him. Cooper sucked air, and struggled. Booth let him.

"Please. Will you tell me what she's like?"

"Jesus Christ," he said, a vicious relief knifing through him, "she's an absolute pain in the fuckin' ass. She steamrolls right over everyone else's opinions; loves to argue; loves dolphins; loves the entire freaking biosphere." He stopped laughing. "She's the love of my goddamn life."

Behind him, Cooper said nothing. Booth opened the door, then hesitated, groping for the thanks. He couldn't do it though. Not to this man.

"I've got to go now," was all he could find. Shutting the door gently behind him.

* * *

_Things will look better in the morning_.

Her mother used to say that, but Brennan had long since realized that it was just one of those things people said. It wasn't true. The light of dawn had no magical ability to fix anything, even in the lab.

Eventually she fled together, exchanging the pearly light of the forensic platform for the florescent illumination of the sub-basement. Unpacking a skeleton, and waiting for that moment when it finally blotted out the image of Booth, pulling away from her.

A minute ticked by. Two. Five. She sighed, and put a yellowed gladiolus back down in it's padded box. Limbo was not an escape from Booth's anger. Apparently neither was her apartment, her bed, or her gym.

The problem was, Booth's anger shouldn't have existed at all. It didn't fit the theory.

Before she could follow that thought, the sound of shoe heels on concrete intruded. For an instant she held her breath, hoping, but they were too light to be Booth's, and they didn't click like high heels. Nor did they whisper like Hodgin's soft soled shoes.

Brennan was just reminding herself of the additional security measures that had been set into place after Zach, when Sweets popped free of a long rack of storage.

"Dr. Brennan!" he blurted out, looking a little bug eyed. "Thank God I found you. It's like a maze down here." He cut his eyes to a high stack of skeletons, shuddering.

"Sweets," she said, wishing it had been a little more maze like. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh," he gave himself a minute shake, and managed to look back at her. "I, uh, I came to tell you that Booth and Catherine are no longer seeing each other."

There was a small silence.

"They broke up," Sweets told her, to make sure she understood.

"I know what you meant," she snapped. "I just don't understand why you're telling me."

"I thought you needed to know."

"Why," she asked again, genuinely mystified.

"Oh come _on_, Dr. Brennan," Sweets told her, and it suddenly felt very much like a conversation with Angela. Same half-chiding exasperation; deeper voice. "How many second chances do we really get in life?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she told him, picking the gladiolus and studying the thick grooves across the surface. At some point the original owner had been stabbed with something more forceful than sharp.

"Okay, sure," he agreed, except it didn't really sound like agreement.

She clenched her jaw against the unfairness of people. Their unpredictable reactions, and unfathomable feelings. How everyone but she herself got to decide when and how important conversations were conducted.

Booth had no reason to be angry.

She'd had four years with him. Given that amount of time, even an undergraduate could've come up with a working ethnography, and Doctor Temperance Brennan was far more than an undergraduate.

Booth believed in honesty, but only up to a certain and ill defined point; he believed integrity was the true strong force in the universe; and he believed love was the most basic element.

_Livin' on love, Bones_, he'd told her with a smirk. A long time ago, when it had still felt awkward to be sitting across from him and eating french fries. She had rolled her eyes, because what life needed was respiration, then fuel, but she'd dutifully added it to the Fundamental Theory of Booth.

It explained why they spent so much time and energy not having sex. He was incapable of sex without a relationship, and she was incapable of a wide variety of things, including relationships. Any attempt would cause serious distress.

"Dr. Brennan?" Sweets asked, and she realized she must have been standing there, not speaking, for quite some time.

"Go away, Sweets," she told him distractedly. He shot her a wounded look, and she amended to: "I mean, I need some time to think."

"Sure, of course," he nodded understandingly, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. "I'll just, I'll go, uh, I'll go back through the massive pile of totally un-creepy bones."

"Good," she said, not really listening. It was a bad habit. She knew it was bad because many people, including the man still in front of her, had told her so. Right now though, the thoughts circling insider her brain were vastly more interesting than the physical.

Booth had, piece by piece, explained himself to her. She had, piece by piece, accepted the explanation. He had kissed her, babbled about decades, but neither of them had fundamentally changed. What had been impossible before the kiss, had to, by definition, still be impossible afterwards. After the initial pain of rejection, he should have realized that. He should be happy with Catherine, but it hadn't lasted.

She didn't know what that meant, but she knew how to find out.

"Booth kissed me," she told Angela. Hovering just inside the entrance to her friend's office. Too restless, or worked up, or too _something_ to be inside.

Angela, working at something on her desk, sat with an xact-o knife poised in mid air and blinked at her. Then she put it down with extreme precision, and picked up her purse. Brushing past Brennan as she headed towards the main door.

"Ange!" Brennan could hear the whine of panic in her own voice, but Angela didn't even break stride.

"Alcohol, Brennan." she said, and Brennan found herself walking both quickly and meekly to catch up. Obediently ordering bourbon at three seventeen in the afternoon. Angela was often right about many things, and if she thought the conversation would need alcohol, then she was going to drink.

Angela slapped her shot glass down, sighing something complex. "Bren, you remember way back when we were working on the Cleo Eller murder?"

"When you talked about quitting?"

"Yeah. When I freaked out about all the death and gloom. Well, I feel like it's happening again, only this time you're the one trying to get away."

"I'm not trying to go anywhere," Brennan said, puzzled. Angela's look flattened out, and she realized she'd taken something too literally.

"Metaphor, Sweetie. I'm saying I feel like we don't have anything in common anymore."

"Angela, we've never had anything in common. You said so yourself; with the pig."

"Yeah, well, I hadn't had sex in five months and 14 days. I was bitchy. And wrong. I was wrong. Six years ago we were both young and single. That's what we had in common."

"And now you're married," Brennan filled in slowly. This didn't feel like solid ground.

"Yeah," Angela softened, "I'm married."

"So, now we can't be friends, because you got married?" She forced the words out, thinking about the awkwardness she had brushed off just a few days ago.

"Brennan, no. Listen to me. I'm saying that I've suddenly gone up this huge ladder, but I feel like you're sliding down a chute, or something. Like we're not even in the same place anymore."

"Because you got married?" Brennan tried again. Angela shook her head.

"No, because I have this amazing relationship, with this amazing guy." Brennan just looked at her, and Angela took a recouping breath. "Look, for me, all the guys before Jack were pretty much a form of recreation, right?"

"You mean sex?"

"Yes, that too. Also dinner, and dancing, and perfecting the art of flirting my ass off. You know; fun. Then I went out with Jack, and everything changed. Suddenly there was this guy who was really, _really _good in bed, but also wanted to tell me all these things about himself. What he knew, and thought, and feared, and all he wanted in return was for me to tell him how I saw the world."

"That's what you want for me? To find some sort of intellectual relationship, so I can learn about myself?" She smiled. Angela did not.

"Yeah, Bren. That's exactly what I want. Don't you?"

Did she?

Being with Michael had certainly been intellectually stimulating, but their relationship had always been built on competition, and the listening they'd been doing had been more about picking points to rebut than finding understanding. Nothing like the concordat of paradigms Angela was describing.

If Angela was right; if relationships were truly built on understanding differences, and not forcing similarities, then. . .

"Look," Angela continued when Brennan didn't say anything, "I'm not saying it has to be Booth. It could be the Pope in Rome for all I care. I'm just want to be able to cry on your shoulder about how much it can suck loving Jack Hodgins, and I want you to have a glimmer of understanding when I do. I want you to be in the same place I am."

"Not at the bottom of a chute."

"Yeah," Angela finally offered a smile. "Does that make any sense?"

"I. . .Ange, I don't think anyone really wants to know me that way."

"You're wrong," was all Angela said.

()

"Dr. Brennan?"

Brennan looked up at the voice. It was Cam. Standing in the door, coat looped over her clasped hands. She had fled back to Limbo after Angela, and now it was probably full night outside.

"I just came to say goodnight," her boss told her, confirming the suspicion.

"Oh. Good night," Brennan said, and Cam gave her a smile and a little nod, obligation fulfilled.

"Cam," she made the other woman turn back, "how many free passes do you think I still have?" For a second, Cam looked confused, and Brennan felt a clenching that the moment would stutter into awkwardness. Then she tipped her head a little, calculating.

"At three a week? I'd say forty of fifty," she tried to look suspicious, but Brennan could tell that the lines around her eyes were not a frown. "Why? Are you planning something big?"

"No," she shrugged lightly, smiling, "I just like to keep track."

"Well," Cam leaned forward some, face sober and eyes wide, the way she looked when she was teasing, "remember to keep me updated, okay?"

"Yes," Brennan nodded, "hourly if necessary."

Surprise made Cam's smile slow to deepen, but when it did, it went far, and her second good night felt far less routine.

She'd made a theory of Booth. Taken in every hypothesis proven, every action observed, and built a mold of him. Except. . .except she'd forgotten something. Theories were not Laws. If the evidence no longer fit, then the theory had to change. She'd made a mistake.

Slowly she put the dead Union solider back into his box. Placed him back into storage, and went home. The knock, when it came, made her jump. From nerves, not surprise. She told her pounding heart to stop being so ridiculous, and opened the door.

Booth was standing on the other side. Hand shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunched in. Standing up over the balls of his feet, with something desperate on his face.

"I've realized something," he told her, eyes boring straight into hers but not making any moves forward. She could feel the courage it was taking.

"We've all gone around thinking we had something on you. Me, Cam, Angela, Sweets; everyone. We thought we knew more about the world than you did. 'There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your science,' he quoted his own chastisement back to her.

"We thought we knew better. We even convinced you we knew better, but you know what? That's complete crap. Your enough, Bones. Your enough, just the way you are. So the next time one of us says differently, just, do me a favor and punch whoever it is in the nose. Okay? Even me." He shoved a hand through his hair, giving a strangled little laugh. "Jesus, especially me."

She studied him, standing in her doorway. He looked. . .rumpled. Hair standing in untidy ridges, with dark rings under his eyes. He hadn't been sleeping, or sleeping badly, and he'd done whichever it was without changing clothes. His jeans had sharp creases, and his tee-shirt, while still tight enough to nicely define his pectorals was stretched out at the bottom.

"Bones, say something, all right? Just, please, say something."

He was starting to panic. She couldn't allow that. Not after he'd been so brave. She put her hand over his heart, feeling it drum against her palm. The driving force of his cardiovascular system, pumping on overdrive from the electrical signals sparking through his brain. Everything in balance.

()

Bones wasn't answering. She was standing just inside the door, fingers white against the wood grain. Looking at him with the exact expression of a dissector, not answering.

Booth felt something invisible stab through his throat. Free falling through his chest to transect all those vital arteries, and all he could think was how much he deserved it. Sweet bearded Jesus, how he deserved it. For being the kind of moron who got himself into this situation twice. For thinking a story could be some sort of magic talisman.

Then Bones shuffled forward, eyes on him the entire way, like she wasn't sure of her welcome. When he didn't move, she leaned her head on his chest, a hand over his heart.

He swallowed, and put his arms around her. Holding tight, and okay, sure, she might not believe in psychology, but she sure as hell seemed to believe in body language. Leaning in and pushing away, all at the same time.

"We shouldn't even be friends, Booth." Her head was still tucked under his chin, so he couldn't see her face, but he could imagine it easily. Vulnerable, and trying to shut that down. "I'm terrible at empathy, I don't believe in God, I-I-I don't even _like_ sports."

She blurted out that last bit like it really was the clincher, and somehow it caught him. He started to laugh. He laughed, and couldn't stop. She tried to squirm away but kept her trapped against his chest, until she was laughing to. Gasping and spluttering into his shoulder.

The rode out the aftershocks still pressed together, but then she got quite and pulled away enough to put a hand on his cheek. Thumb resting against his lips, and looking so wistful that leaned into her touch harder, wondering if would be the last time.

"You're such a good man, Booth," she said, kind of low and choked.

"Yeah, well, you're a good woman, Bones," he said back, wanting her to believe with the same force that he wanted breath. She just gave him an enigmatic smile, and put her head back on his shoulder. He squeezed a little tighter, rocking them both.

"We should go inside," she finally said, and he let go. Biting her lip, avoiding his eyes, she grabbed his hand, stitching their fingers together as she pulled.

"Sure," he agreed easily, giving her a smile, trying to find a place that didn't feel so overwrought. She darted a look his way, and he got the impression he wasn't doing a great job.

They stopped in the middle of the living room. Standing face to face, but she was looking steadily at something on the floor. Her hair was pulled away from her face, and her already fine features looked etched. Like she was something that couldn't quite exist on earth.

"Sweets told me you broke up with Catherine," she said, and now her eyes were locked onto his like a steam bore. He couldn't help it, he laughed. Across from him she looked puzzled, and terrified.

"What?"

"Our friends," he shook his head, helpless to explain.

"Oh," she grinned, suddenly mischievous. "They do like to interfere, don't they?" They gaped at each other; a pair of totally amazed fish, but her smile slipped.

"I talked with Angela today," she pressed on towards wherever she was going, a little furrow between her brows. "She told me that I may have misconstrued the nature of intimate relationships."

"I've been telling you that for years, Bones."

"Yes, but this made sense," she said peevishly. At his look, guilt flashed across her face. "I mean - "

"Never mind. I get it," he waved it away before they could really get side tracked. His heart would burst if this when on much longer. "Just, say what you were going to say."

"I made a mistake," she said abruptly, no preamble and no apology, leaving him once again adrift in her wake. Exactly the way she always did. "I realize you may not feel the same anymore, but I wanted you to know. You deserve to know."

Three months ago, Booth would have called the moment a division. The ending of one thing and the beginning of another. That wasn't the world, though. Everything from before always fed into everything after.

He lifted a hand to run the back of his knuckles along her cheek. She leaned into the touch, close to tears, but she never took her eyes from his and he could not for the life of him imagine anything more intimate. This time he didn't need tequila, or mistletoe, or surprise. This time she leaned in just as much as he did, and when her hand slipped behind his neck, it felt just right. The way a first kiss should.

()

They were kissing. Again. Though he'd probably find some absurdly illogical way of claiming this was the first kiss.

Brennan decided she'd make it memorable as possible. Sliding a hand behind his neck to keep him in place and pushing up on her toes, letting the tip of her tongue trace the rim of his lip as she slid up his body. The hands on her hips pulled tight and he made a low sound, ribs expanded sharply against hers.

Satisfied, she pulled away gently. His open eyes were sparkling, light glinting off the expanded pupil. A hungry look, and with anyone but Booth, it would lead forthwith to sex. This _was _Booth though; who seemed to think chivalry was both alive, and fun. Meaning sex on the table was probably out.

"Now what?" she asked, and it made him chuckle.

"Jeeze, Bones, it's not like I have the play book. We could try sitting."

"Oh," she said, glancing at the couch and feeling foolish. "Of course."

"C'mon," he said, hand in hers to tow her towards the piece of furniture. He sat, pulling her down next to him. Putting a foot up on the opposite knee and slinging an arm behind her shoulder.

"You okay?" he asked, and she was surprised to find that she was. Nervous, yes. Uncertain. However, those states didn't seem as dire as they usually did.

"Yes, I'm okay."

"Good, cause I really don't have it in me to spend tonight hauling you back from the next county," he joked. She couldn't think of any reply to that, staying silent instead.

"That was a joke," he said after a couple beats. She rolled her eyes.

"I know that."

"Okay," he said easily, and was quiet again. Brennan felt it pushing against her. She fidgeted, and made herself stop.

"Booth?" she asked, and felt him sigh a little.

"Yeah, Bones."

"We haven't really resolved anything."

"I know." Apparently he was perfectly happy with the state of affairs.

"So what do we do?" she prodded. Half exasperation, half something she usually didn't like to hear. Uncertainty, or vulnerability. It was okay, though. It was Booth, and this was what they did.

He chaffed a hand up her arm, and it shivered into her, not with heat, but with comfort. "A day at a time, right Bones?"

It wasn't enough. Wasn't the guarantee she wanted. Was, in it's own way as frightening as the decades he had wanted. "Right," she said, and tried to will that type of faith into herself.

* * *

A/N: Well, well?

Thanks to Mochi-girl and Sintah for pointing out the naming mistake in chapter 10


	12. Chapter 12

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 12**

"Dr. Brennan."

Charlie's round curves looked out of place amongst the aggressive linearity of the lab. Hands on his kid's shoulders and standing in a sun beam, like some classic marble of Father and Son. Tau sure looked a lot like a statue.

Booth had spent the night at Bones' apartment. On the couch. He'd decided to categorize it as progress. Along with the fact that Bones was still talking to him, and hadn't, in fact, run off to the next county.

They'd even had breakfast together, sitting at her breakfast bar and drinking coffee. Like They were some old couple. Now Bones was looking down with obvious discomfort, and Tau was staring up looking lightening struck. Dark eyes huge as he stared at her, open mouthed.

"Tau's feeling better, and he wanted to come say thank you. Right, Tau?" He bumped the boy forward.

"Hello, Tau," Bones said, talking louder and slower. "I'm glad to hear you're feeling better."

"Yeah buddy, that's great news," Booth chimed in. Bones shot him a grateful look, but Tau wasn't to be distracted. He stared like a hypnotized snake, adoration and raw panic slowly flushing up his cheeks. Booth suppressed a smile. The first time a guy falls, he falls hard.

"Um," Bones flailed, casting desperately around for something child appropriate, finally pointing towards Tau's arm. "Would you like me to sign your cast?"

For a second, Booth thought the something in the kid's brain was going to burst, but then he managed to eek out a nod. Eyeballs plastered to Bones' face as his bobbing head rotating around them, which, yeah, was actually a little creepy. Bones hurried off for a pen.

"Tau," Charlie spoke to his son, "you want to get some ice cream after this?"

Tau staring towards where Bones had disappeared, didn't even flicker. Charlie turned his grin on Booth. "His mom's a vegan. Kid gets ice cream three, maybe four times a year. Any other time, he'd crawl over hot glass."

Booth chuckled, and Bones came back, brandishing a marker scavenged from Angela. Kneeling down as they all solemnly watched her trace her name over the plaster. One hand helping to support the cast, Tau drinking in how she bit her lower lip in concentration.

Booth followed her hand, making a T then an E then an M, feeling like she was branding the letters into his brain. Some thrashing synapse trying like hell to bridge the gap and spark a new universe.

Something.

Something to do with coincidence. Something. . .and Tau. Coincidence, and Tau craning to look up at Bones.

"Oh my god," he breathed, and everyone but the boy in questioned looked at him.

"Tau," he collapsed down to one knee, hauling the boy around until they were eye to eye. Bones' name trailed into gibberish, snapping Tau out of his induced hypnosis. Face blanking as he made the critical decision about whether this was worth crying over.

"Hey!" Charlie protested sharply, but Booth held out a furiously shushing hand and Charlie hesitated. Not exactly backing down, but not pressing forward either.

"Tau," Booth said, trying for an easy smile. A very non-frightening smile. "You like ice cream, right?"

Eyeing Booth cautiously, Tau conceded to a minimalist's outline of a nod.

"Yeah, of course. What kid doesn't like ice cream." Booth ratcheted up the smile. Tau ratcheted up the doubtful look. Booth let go of his shoulders, rubbing his palms down the front of his pants.

"Booth," Bones eeled in, impatient and reproachful all at once, but he managed a single desperate eye lock, and she closed her mouth.

"If I show you a picture, and you can tell me who it is, I promise your dad'll get you an ice-cream cone. Okay?"

Tau pinned him with the shrewd look of the perpetually ice-cream deprived, and held up two fingers. Booth nodded manically. "Two scoops, absolutely," he agreed, snatch a photo and holding it up with both hands. Tau looked at it, and when white. Charlie twitched like a restive lion.

"Tau," Booth worked not to grab him again, "is this the man that pushed you off the cliff?"

"No, Booth," Bones said from behind Tau, hand now on the kid's shoulder, pulling him back. "You can't."

He was leading the witness, and no judge was going to sign an arrest warrant based on a coerced identification by a six-year old. Even Bones knew that. It was okay though, because Booth knew they were about to find something better.

"Charlie," Booth said, looking up at his assistant. "Go get some ice-cream, okay?" The look he got back was clearly meant to communicate that Charlie wasn't stupid. Charlie wasn't going anywhere.

Still kneeling on the floor, Booth jerked his head towards Tau, dragging his assistants eyes over. Letting the office agent, the man who did research and never fired his gun, make the decision. Satisfy his vengeance, or hold his shaking son.

Breaking his gaze, Charlie leaned down and hoisted the boy into his arms. Bones glared down at him, arms crossed, impatience grooving her face. Shit, her foot was practically tapping.

"Booth!" she snapped, and he smiled, making her wait for it a second longer before he stood up.

"We've been running this case like a string of coincidences," he said. "Someone pushed Tau off a cliff and broke his arm. You examined his arm, and found the handprint on his chest. The three of us went looking for footprints, and stumbled on Dana Marquez' grave. Cam ran a tox screen on Samuel Klemm, and Hodgins miraculously found the same chemical in Dana Marquez. It's a whole truck load of good luck, but what if the only true coincidence was Tau being in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

She cocked her head, and Booth knew he had her. Her supercharged brain working the outside pieces. "Sweets thought Tau interrupted the killer returning to the site of Dana Marquez' grave."

"But what if," Booth picked up the through without a gap, "what if Tau surprised the killer while he was burying something else."

Bones nodded slowly, listening to the inner tide of recall and bending it to her will. "Alexis Klemm said her attacker wore a protective suit. He'd have to get rid of it somewhere."

"Bingo," Booth said, and tried to rub away the throbbing in his knee. She came back from that removed place, rolling her eyes a little.

"You should be more careful. Your joints are quite fragile.

"Yeah, Bones," he said, and her smile turned up, pleased as a cat. The brightness in her eyes was sharp and clear and bright, fired from within by intelligence and presence. He lifted a hand and traced her lower lip. Letting his fingers slide down to her chin, feeling it throb in his chest.

"What do we do now?" she finally asked softly, leaning into his hand.

"About Alexanders?" He asked, taking his hand back. Her eyes followed it down. "Well, we don't need a warrant for a little investigative radar-ing, now do we?"

"That's not a word," she told him, but he was already propelling her forward. Turning her around and pressing a hand against her back.

He felt her pause. A tiny little check that clenched into his stomach. This hadn't been them for a long time. Maybe still wasn't. Then she gave him the sort of smile that made him glad bravery existed.

* * *

Brennan looked up at the shout.

_If it's another body, _she thought, leaning on a shovel and trying to push some hair back out of her eyes,_ I'll let Booth give it away_.

She was standing thigh deep in a hole, and had passed dirty a long time ago. In fact, she probably qualified as filthy. Exhaustion had come, and been overcome by the sort of dogged determination of soldiers on a forced march. Holes now dotted the little field where they had found Dana Marquez.

Ground penetrating radar, it turned out, was great a picking out anomalies, and very, very bad at defining them. Once she and Booth had drug it across the bluff, seventeen little flags had been stuck into their wake.

Booth had grimaced at the jaunty orange markers, and called for backup.

Now, almost ten hours later, a woman in FBI coveralls was whooping. Standing in her own thigh deep hole and waving her shovel. She joined Booth at the rim. He was incredibly dirty. Dress shirt smeared with dirt, needing a shave, looking grimly down. It wasn't a body, though. It was a Tyvek suit. With booties, and a hood.

By the time Brennan made it over, the tech had lifted it out. She watched as something shiny fell from the bundle, thunking back down into the hole. The woman scrambled down after it, securing it into an evidence bag.

"What the hell is it?" Boot pointed to the metallic spike, now laying on Hodgin's work bench.

The ride back to the lab had been very quiet. Booth's hands tight on the steering wheel, his pterygoid muscles clenched tight. His tension had tightened into her own stomach as she snuck sideways looks at him.

He'd spent the night on her couch. He had done it before, but this was different. If Angela was right, and relationships were an evolution of learning...well, she was very good a learning. She could do this.

Carefully, she had stretched out, putting a hand on his knee. He didn't turn, but his face had relaxed some, and he'd laced his hand with hers. It was a tiny thing, but it had been right. That had been hours ago, though. Now they were standing around Hodgins' work station, looking at what they had found at the bottom of the pit.

"It's a marline spike," Hodgins said, poking the object with a gloved finger. "Sailors use them to help splice lines."

"Does it fit the wound track?" Brennan asked, not really seeing how the discussion of sailors was relevant.

"Perfectly," Hodgins told them. Cam had already done blood analysis on the tyvek suit. Outside were smears of Samuel Klemm's blood. Inside were epithelial cells.

"Looks like we need old Alexanders' DNA," Booth said, looking grimly determined.

* * *

"Jesus," Booth sighed. A profanity that made neither Sweets, nor Bones turn from the mirror they were broodingly staring into. Watching a very un-sweaty and un-alarmed David Alexanders.

"What about Hodgins?" Sweets stood with crossed arms, frowning at the mirror. "He proved the Sodium thiopental stored at the NIH matches the sample from all three victims. Perfect match. Shouldn't that get us a warrant?"

"It's still circumstantial, Sweets," Bones answered for him. "Caroline has already told us no."

Sweets snorted, still staring steadily through the mirror. Booth glanced over at Bones, but she didn't return the look. He kinda wondered if either of them were even blinking. Could three hours plus of watching Special Agent Seeley Booth fail to obtain a DNA sample put a person into some kind of coma?

"Jesus," he muttered one more time, just for the hell of it. "Goddamn micro-expressions. What a psychopath."

Nothing more than frustration, but beside him Sweets was suddenly choking and going all goggly eyed. Like maybe he'd just seen the second coming.

"What?" Booth asked. Sweets blinked and quivered. "Hey!" Booth reached out to prod, but the kid snatched his hand.

"Psychopathology," he whispered, all low and intense, eyes rolling all around as he squeezed the life out of Booth's fingers. "I-I need. . .I need to - ", then he lost the power of speech. Bulging eyes swiveling between Booth and the door. Finally, with one last agonized look, he bolted.

"O-kay," Booth shook his fingers out.

Bones watched the door with that dismissive irritation that only she could make so cute. "What the hell was that?" she demanded.

Booth grinned. "When you gotta go, you gotta go."

She turned a look on him. It felt very familiar. "Aw, come on Bones. Even you've seen Jurassic Park."

"Sometimes I find you very annoying," she told him gravely.

He smiled again, then drug a hand down his face. Trying to rub the punch drunk away. It didn't work all that well. "We better go after him."

She looked back at the door, a little reluctant this time. "I suppose we have to."

Unfortunately, finding him didn't take very long. Sweets had gone to ground in his office, and man-oh-man, did the place look like a whirlwind. Books and papers scattered on the ground, three books splayed open on his once organized desk.

"Sweets, what the hell?" Booth announced them. Walking into his office ahead of Bones, and getting the full brunt of the look snapped their way. Mouth open, brain revving, nothing coming out. Complete rapture.

He turned towards Bones. "I think he's having some kind of nerd seizure."

"If he was having petit-mal seizure he wouldn't have been able to run up two flights of stairs and throw all his papers on the floor," she told him. Suggesting that next, he'd need someone to remind him the moon wasn't made of green cheese.

"I'm not having a seizure." Sweets finally said, finding pissy.

"Yeah well, you're sure as hell doin' something. So come on," he circled his hand in that universal motion of threatening encouragement. "Spit it out."

Which he didn't, of course. Straightening up instead, the smoothness of his lecture face blanking out all that frantic eye bulging of earlier.

"Jeeze, here we go," Booth moaned, collapsing back onto the couch. Bones darted a look between the two of them, then chose solidarity, sitting down beside him. He smiled at her happily, but she just gave him the stink eye.

"Here we go what?" She demanded.

"He's not a psychopath," Sweets said, before he could answer. Something burning through the paleness of his skin. The unholy fire of intelligence.

"That," Booth groaned out, slumping down even more. Incredibly, they both shot him a look. "Jesus," he muttered, but Sweets was moving on.

"There are currently two different tools commonly used to diagnose sociopathy. The first, Hare Psychopathy Checklist is literally that - a list of behavior traits associated with sociopathy. The higher you rate, the loonier you are."

"Are psychologist allowed to say loony?" Booth leaned close to Brennan's ear. In response, she reached over and squeezed his knee, digging in under the muscle until he had to clap his own hand over hers.

"The second is the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, which mirrors Hare's Checklist, but uses some subjective criteria as well."

"Why are you telling us this?" Bones asked, sounding if not exactly won over, at least not completely hostile. So much for solidarity.

"Because neither psycho-diagnostic tool finds him to be a sociopath. The blunted affect comes from something else. I couldn't figure out what, until now."

"So, are you going to enlighten us?" Booth asked.

"Theory of Mind," Sweets told them, like he was unveiling the Sphinx. Booth sighed a little more.

"Which is?"

"Essentially, the ability to interpret other's thoughts and feelings. People who lack Theory of Mind have a hard time predicting and interpreting other's behavior. It's something people with Autism spectrum disorders often struggle with."

"You think he's autistic?" Booth asked.

"Most probably Aspergers Syndrome. It explains the lack of micro-expressions, why he has a hard time meeting your eyes. All kinds of things."

"How does that help us?"

"I don't know." Sweets shrugged his narrow shoulders. Booth drug a hand down his face. "But it's probably explains the anomaly of Alexis Klemm and October Hadley."

"Why?"

"People with Aspergers can have a very difficult time recognizing non-verbal communication, as well as tone of voice. Both of which are a huge part of recognizing a couples' love language, including looks and touch. Unless Alexis Klemm and October Hadley started sucking each other's tonsils in front of him, Alexanders probably could not deduce they were a couple. All he saw was no husband."

"Can you prove that?"

"No. Not unless Alexanders confirms it."

"So, why the hell did you go shooting out of Interrogation with your tail on fire?" Booth couldn't quite keep his voice neutral.

"Because he figured out the mystery, Booth. He solved the riddle." He didn't expect Brennan to answer. Really didn't expect the psychologist and the anthropologist to share a little smile of mutual understanding.

"Whatever," Booth said, standing up. "It's late, I'm tired. I'm going to bed."

"Your being nice to Sweets again," Bones told him, once they were far enough down the hall.

"Yeah, well," he started, then couldn't think what to say after that. Beside him, Bones kept perfect stride, that uncertain furrow permanently lodged between her brows.

"You're tired," she told him, coming to a complete halt and looking at him like she'd said something significant.

"Yeah, Bones," he said, wearily trying to figure out what sort of cryptic thing _you're tired _meant in Bones lingo. Beside him the lady in question licked her lips, darted a glance back down the hall, then stood straighter.

"Come stay at my apartment," she said. Talking quick, like she had to stay ahead of her courage. "It's closer," she started to justify when he didn't say anything. "You'll get more sleep if you don't have to drive all -"

"Bones," he cut her off, speaking slow, giving her a good, solid smile. "Thanks, I'd like that."

"Oh," she said, and darted another glance back towards Sweets' door. Reminding him of being a teenager, standing on her mother's porch. Suddenly, despite David Alexanders, despite the whole crap-tastic case, that's exactly what he felt like. Sixteen, and full of hope.

"So," he said after a while, popping up an eyebrow, nodding encouragingly towards the elevators, "should we maybe go?"

"Oh," she said again, and he could have sworn she almost blushed. Looking at the elevators like they were modern marvels. "I. . .yes. We should go."

He let her drive, but she spent the ride giving him quick little looks. It started to get to him, and by the time they got to her door, he was about half an oxygen molecule from hitting the floor.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" she demanded when he got stuck in the doorway. He took a breath, and stepped inside, but then she started unbuttoning his shirt. Her fingers sure and full of ownership.

"Bones -" he squeaked, but she cut him off, hands stilling as she looked him full in the face.

"Booth, shut up."

He did. Mouth snapped closed as she stripped him of his shirt, the air prickling across his skin as she circled behind him. The warmth of her palm on his back made him jump.

"Relax," she said, a rich thread of amusement in her voice. Her thumbs dug into the muscles along his spine, and all he could do was groan. "Your back is hurting," she said. He grunted as she pressed into a knot, feeling her work all the way to the base of his skull. When she finished, she stepped around him again. Her lip was back between her teeth, but she didn't look uncertain. She didn't even look scared.

"Your tired," she told him again, a tiny little question hiding behind the words.

"Not that tired," he said. She laughed. Low and quiet, eyes flicking away, and he loved how they came right back to him.

"Good," she said, and then her mouth was on his.

()

Booth smelled good. He had always smelled good. It was one of the ways she knew they would make exceedingly robust offspring. Attractive scent implied they shared few immune related genes, which in turn meant they were not inbreeding. Also, the size and strength of his gluteal muscles -

"Bones," Booth's lips at her ear cut the thought off. "Stop thinking."

She tipped her chin up, and laughed. "I'm not sure I can."

"Oh," he pulled back, and even she could tell there was something wicked in his eyes. "I'm pretty sure you can."

So Booth-like, so quintessentially himself. It triggered that strange torrent in her , and desire, and something else she wouldn't name. Not now. It tightened her muscles, and her breath came short.

"Bones," Booth said again, tracing a finger down from temple to chin, "don't, okay? Don't do that."

Suddenly, standing there with him in the quiet of her own living room, his hand soft agains her skin, _don't _truly seemed possible. She took a deep breath, blew it out, and nodded. "Okay."

"Yeah?" He seemed to be trying to see through her. Or into her. Something.

"Yes," she said, and before either of them could think about that too much, she grabbed the hem of her shirt and stripped it off. "I still don't believe people can defy physics," she told him. Standing there in her bra and pants, feeling suddenly and distinctly obstreperous. He put a hand on her stomach. Fingers spread wide, so she could feel each cool digit against the heat of her skin.

"I know," he told her, and she realized suddenly that she wanted him. Not just sex, or even sex with him. She wanted _him._

Maybe, possibly, he wanted her back?

Still looking at her steadily, he slid his hands behind her, sliding the hooks on her bra apart with admirable dexterity. An ability she'd discovered men developed only after a great deal of practice.

She was about to figure out exactly how much practice Booth had. The though made heat bolted through her. Head to groin fast as light, and her chin tipped back, hindbrain baring her throat. Booth's lips slid along an infrahyoid muscle, back up to her ear. Where he whispered "You're thinking again."

"Booth, shut _up_," she snapped, and gave his nape hairs a yank sharp enough to sting. He gasped, and pulled back, giving her an indignant look. She laughed and felt him twitch against her low belly.

"Jeeze, Bones," he told her, a little smile playing with the edge of his lips.

"You don't own me, and I'll think when I want," she told him, still holding onto his hair. It was play, but at the same time it wasn't play, and of course Booth knew it. The smile changed into something a little more serious.

"I know that too," he said.

"Or get married." She pushed. She couldn't seem to help it. God forbid Temperance Brennan leave a theory untested, even when the answer could leave her raw.

"I want you, Bones." He pulled back to look her in the eye. "Not who we think you are, or who we think you should be. Just you. I know I screwed that up before, but if you give me the chance, I'll show you that I understand now."

He was Booth; he didn't lie. Chances were high he wasn't lying now. Standing there, with her bra sagging open and his shirt off, she reminded herself of what Angela had said. Not a war of ideologies, but a blending of theories.

She nodded. His smile came back, but the seriousness stayed in his eyes. She liked the combination. She brushed the back of knuckles against his cheek, and he leaned into the touch. Something else was also leaning into her touch. She grinned, and dropped a hand to the bulge at his crotch, squeezing through his pants.

"Hey! What the hell?" He looked so wounded, suddenly five feet from her with a hand clapped over his crotch, that she laughed.

"It's still sex, Booth, even if you focus on the attachment over orgasms. It's still supposed to be fun."

"That's important equipment!" he yelped, not moving his hand.

"Would you like me to kiss it, and make it better?"

He snorted, and when she stepped forward, he shifted back.

"Stay still," she commanded, and took another step. His breath went out sharply, and his stomach muscles tensed as she made his pants give into gravity, but he did obey. Underneath, his boxers had a large yellow shield with a red S emblazoned across the Y front. The waist band proudly proclaimed him a Man of Steel.

"You know," she told his ridiculous underwear, "Angela hypothesized it wasn't just the socks and ties."

"Can I move now?" he asked, the sardonicism a thick drawl.

"Yes," she told him primly. He rolled his eyes.

"What is it with you women and my underoos?" He asked, but the question was clearly rhetorical. Before she could answer, he waggled his eyebrows, stuck his thumbs under the band of his underwear, and shucked them right off.

Oh. My.

He grinned, and she hoped like hell she wasn't blushing. But. . .two could play at that game. The already open bra slid off her shoulders easily, whispering onto the floor. Booth's eyelids went to half mast, and his look intensified. The male of the species, in full erotic form. It bolted heat through her.

"Like what you see, Bones?" he asked, a smirk somewhere in the words. She didn't bother answering. Just flicked her eyes down, then up, and turned towards her bedroom. After a second, she heard him padding after her. Just past the door a hand on her shoulder pulled her to a stop, pivoting her around and pressing them close.

That was another thing; they were compatible heights. Standing like this, he pressed quite nicely against her pubic bone. She made an approving noise, and felt him grin into the kiss. Knowing him, it was probably a little smug. Then he cradled her breast, and the rasping of her jeans sparked to exquisite.

"Booth," she groaned, "pants."

"Uh huh," he said, hands stroking up her back in a long, slow swoop, leaning back to grin at her. She slitted her eyes, and wrapped her hand around his shaft, squeezing lightly. He sucked in breath, muscles jumping, but didn't make a move towards her waistband.

Instead he pulled her hand away, looking down as he slowly traced the back of each finger. She watched, and when he was done, he pulled her close for another kiss. It melted into her, and the sharp desire modulated into something that pulsed slower, but felt deeper.

She breathed in, feeling the intimacy swell and crash over her. It hurt to be this close to him. It felt good, and it hurt, and she before this she hadn't understood how they could ever combine.

"Day at a time, Bones," Booth reminded her, voice low. Picking up on her breathing, or her heartbeat, or whatever it was that clued him into how people were feeling. Doing it effortlessly, because he was Booth.

She ran a finger down to the point of his chin, seeing the openness in his eyes and the lines around his mouth. She kissed him, and it felt slower than before, but it held more heat. Coaxing his lips with the tip of her tongue, she unsnapped her own jeans. Shaking them off as she guided him towards the bed.

She ended up underneath him, legs wrapped around his hips. He bowed his forehead down into her shoulder, taking deep breaths. Then he kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, the point of her jaw. He slid over to her earlobe, and she arched against him.

"You liked that," he said, and she laughed.

"Yes."

"Good," he smiled, and dropped his head back down. Working his lips down her body with detailed care. Starting at the inside of her wrist, and across to the other one. Down her chest, barely brushing against her nipples. Until the pulsing in her groin was a near constant fire.

She ran her hands down his back, cupping his butt and pressing her hips up with clear intent, but he pulled back.

"If you don't go faster, I'm going to kill you," she told him in all seriousness, but he laughed. She used it to get a hand between their bodies, grabbing hold just behind the glans and running a light finger down his frenulum.

"God, Bones," his laughter choked off, and she squeezed until his breath came harder. When she stopped, he whined out a groan.

"You deserved that," she told him, and he laughed again. A low chuckle she had never heard from him before tonight.

"Yeah, okay," he said. This time though, he matched his kiss by pressing inside her. She let her head fall back, arching her hips to meet him, finding a rhythm without much effort. Then, in a place she considered to be significantly less than halfway though, he stopped.

"You're so beautiful," he told her, and it sounded a little desperate. Balanced on his hands and looking down as if he wanted to see the oxytocin and norepinephrin spill along her limbic system, sending licks of white heat down her limbs. Like he wanted proof.

There were times in life when she didn't know how to move forward. What to say, or do, or offer. This was not one of those times. She pushed her fingers into his hair again, running down his face until her hand again pressed against the fast beat of his heart.

"Thank you, Booth." Her voice wasn't exactly steady, and the tension around his eyes slacked.

"Bones, you know what this is, right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, looking him straight in the eye. She wasn't unafraid, but fear wasn't the only thing. Maybe that was the secret, after all. Standing next to him, and simply not moving away. "It's you and me."

* * *

A/N: boy/girl sex, folks; it ain't my thing. Reassurance?


	13. Chapter 13

**Change of Time  
By: **TamsinBailey

* * *

**Chapter 13**

When Booth made it back to the Hoover the next morning, Sweets was still standing in front of the one-way mirror.

"Hey man, did you leave at all?"

"No." There didn't seem to be much to say to that, so he didn't. Sweets was unshaven and rumpled, his eyes rimmed in pink. He looked a little pathetic, and Booth felt a swell of affection for the guy.

"I stayed at Bones' place last night," he said, just because it seemed right. Sweets looked at him, then he smiled. A grin that was, well, it was sweet. Booth cleared his throat.

"So, you want to go get some breakfast?"

"Yeah," Sweets said, "that sounds good." He didn't move, though Just stood there smiling like a moron.

"Jesus, Sweets. Don't turn into a twelve-year-old girl on me, okay?"

"Yeah," Sweets said. "Yeah, okay. Lets go eat." He gestured towards the door, and Booth strode out, but he could feel the pressure of that grin pushing between his shoulder blades. It was probably dumb to forgive the kid. Phenomenally stupid, but he couldn't seem to stop.

Once they had eggs, and bacon, and toast, he dug in. "Why did you stay?"

"Oh," Sweets sighed. "You're going to make fun of me."

"Yeah, probably." Booth loaded some egg onto his toast, and took a bite. Sweets snorted a little.

"You do know what positive reinforcement is, right?"

"Sure, it's when I don't beat the information out of you."

"Right," Sweets said, but he didn't sound all that upset. In fact, he sounded kind of happy. "I was trying to think of Alexanders' motivation."

"All night?"

Sweets shrugged. Booth sighed. "He's a psycho, Sweets. That's his motivation."

"But he's _not_," the psychologist insisted. Booth stopped chewing his toast. "Even if you don't believe the checklists on psychosis, he still doesn't match. He isn't de-compensating. His killings aren't accelerating, or becoming more brutal."

"He drained a kids blood into a bucket. Seems pretty brutal to me."

"Maximum trauma," Sweets said, "not maximum brutality. Samuel Klemm, Dana Marquez, six others. All killed quickly, almost mercifully. It doesn't make any sense."

"Maybe he just gets off on the power. Like you said; maximum trauma. None of those women will ever be the same. Seeing shrinks, taking drugs just to get by. Maybe he likes knowing he left a mark."

"If it was power, he would have draw the whole process out, make it last as long as possible, but Dana and Sam both died in minutes."

"Whatever," Booth threw a few bills onto the table. "You come up with it, you let me know."

"Yeah, sure," Sweets agreed, sounding distracted. "Hey!" the other guy made him turn back. "Congratulations, Booth."

"For what?" Booth asked. Sweets little smile was back, but for the first time in a while, it didn't make him want to punch the guy in the nose.

"Thanks, Sweets," he said, and pushed on out the door. He needed to get busy, to find something, anything, to hook into Alexanders.

In the afternoon, he went to the Jeffersonian, bearing coffee. When she saw him, Bones smiled and her eyes didn't waver. It made something he hadn't really realized was tense unclench.

"Hey," he left the coffee waiting below the platform, beeping himself onto the stairs.

"Hi," she said back, the brightness in her eyes making his own smile a little broader. They could do this, he believed.

"Hey Booth," Angela greeted him as well. Standing next to Bones with a sketch pad and pencil in her hands. "Brennan told me you were holding David Alexanders."

"Yeah, holding, but the twenty-four hours are almost up. I'm going to have to charge him, or release him."

That made a glum little silence descend. "What are you guys up to?" Booth asked, trying to dispel it. "Why do you have Dana Marquez back out on the platform?"

"Angela had an idea," Bones told him, pointing towards the sketch pad.

"I'm drawing a picture of what Dana might have looked like as an adult, for her mom. Brennan's helping me with the markers"

"Hey, that's nice," Booth told her. Angela's face transformed when she worked, loosing some kind of self awareness, and Booth always liked getting a glimpse of that kind of concentration. He also very happy over how close Bones was standing. Almost leaning into him, their pinkies brushing.

They all jumped when the lab doors crashed open. Propelled by Sweets skidding in.

"Booth! You were right! You were totally right. They're all seeing shrinks, every single one of them." The always invigorating Sweets did a crash stop in front of their little group. Vibrating like he'd just downed an entire vat of coffee, or maybe some PCP.

Booth reluctantly gave up on his tactical ops to get a hold of Bones' hand without Angela noticing. "Slower, Sweets, with many more details."

"I called around, and I found that all eight of the murder victim's mothers are under psychiatric care." He waved a piece of paper around.

"You can do that?" Booth asked, snatching it away. Sweets shrugged.

"Not really."

"Gah!" Booth yelped, trying to shove the paper back. "Are you trying to get me killed? Caroline's already pissed at me. What do you think she's gonna do when she finds out I touched impermissible evidence?"

"Dude, that's so not the point," Sweets said, his reproach face on. "You didn't let me finish."

"Oh, by all means." Booth stopped poking the paper into his chest. "Please, finish. Then we can all attend my funeral."

"You're over-reaction to Ms. Julien is very interesting, Agent Booth." Sweets eyed him with a shrink-y look. Booth glowered.

"The way you still wet the bed is interesting, Dr. Sweets. My _reaction _to Caroline is self-preservation."

"Sure," Sweets agreed way to easily. "The point is; all the psychiatrists treating the mothers received a request to share demographics with the neurology department of the NIH."

"Uh, what's that mean," Angela asked, her uncertainty echoed by Booth and Brennan.

"It means Alexanders was interested in the mother's mental status and state."

"We always knew he was really after the moms. You told us that several days ago. You still haven't told us why." Brennan chimed in, always ready to squash Sweets inferior discipline. Booth might have laughed at the sour look Sweets shot her, but he was busy.

The mothers were all seeing psychologists. Their kids had been snatched, killed, sometimes in front of them.

"Sweets," he shot in before he and Bones could really get into it, "what were they diagnosed with?"

"The mother's? Uh, they were all diagnosed with some variety of PTSD. Does it matter."

"It matters," Booth said, because things were finally starting to make sense. All three of them turned to look at him.

"Are you maybe going to share with the class?" Angela asked. Booth grinned, but not at her; at Bones.

"You want to come?" he asked, and caught that flare in her eyes. The bright flash of happiness and animation. Even in the middle of a serial killer case, it made something in his chest catch.

"Yes," she said, and they walked away from Sweets' reluctant smile, and Angela's gaped mouth sluice of understanding. They'd catch hell later, but right now they'd just catch a murder.

()

Booth had called ahead, and told Charlie to get Alexanders back into the interrogation room. He looked up when Booth came in.

"Dr. Alexanders," Booth said, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms, looking down at the seated man. The brief car ride over with Bones had felt almost carefree. His hand on her knee, letting the mercury of nascent understand settle, so it didn't wisp away. Now she was on the other side of the glass, and he felt something harder smooth over him.

"Hello, Agent Booth," Alexanders said with his strangely uninflected voice, eyes glancing off his sternum to hold steady on the corner. Booth pursed his lips, drug in a breath, cocked a foot in front of the other. Keeping the atmosphere high. On the table, Alexanders folded hands clenched a little tighter.

"I have enough now, Davie. I'm going to put you in jail for a long, long time."

"The state has the power to compel," Alexanders said softly. "It can put people in jail, it can keep them there, but it can't dictate morality. Jail doesn't fully correlate with guilt."

It wasn't the direction Booth expected, but he could go with it. "We found your suit David, and your fancy little sailor's knife. Eventually we'll get a warrant to test your DNA against the samples we collected. The best thing you can do right now is tell us your side before it gets to that point."

Alexanders sat, mute, staring into his corner. Booth stood, and let the danger seep through him. The success that could come out of this, and the failure. All hinged on what he did next. The breath and blood and brain of him sweet and smooth.

"Hakim," he said broke the silence. Alexanders jerked.

"He shouldn't have died," he said. "He was a good man. He was my friend, there was no reason for him to die."

"No," Booth agreed, but his dead stirred anyway. A young man he'd tried to save. Another young man he'd shot. Behind The chevrons on the wall dug into his shoulders. "A solider should never had to die at his own hand. Never."

"Master Sergeant Booth, United States Army," Alexanders recited in a flat voice. "Recipient of the Bronze Star; recipient of the meritorious Service Medal; recipient of the Purple Heart." Booth felt it creep over his skin, but the other man gave a tiny shrug. "I know how to do research."

"Were talking about Hakim," Booth said again. This time Alexanders hunched in on himself a little.

"Stop saying his name."

"Why?"

"He was better than you, standing there in your little FBI suit, spouting the party line. Hakim was nothing like you. He stood on his own; he was a man."

"Each according to his ability," Booth said slowly, groping towards something that was still a long way off, down a deep tunnel. It was fighting to be born, though. Thrashing in the darkness. At the table, Alexander's head twisted a little further away.

"Man is disturbed not by things, but the views he takes on them," Alexanders quoted softly. "The world is disturbed by monsters, Agent Booth. Vilifies their actions, condemns their bodies, consigns their souls to the darkness. Sometimes, though, the world needs monsters."

"Dana Marquez," Booth said slowly, letting each syllable round off his tongue. He was so close. It ached inside him. "Samuel Klemm."

"No," Alexanders shook his head sharply. "Luz Marquez, Alexis Klemm. I provided the stressor, studied the results. No random variables, no noise in the system. Just pure data. I have no empathy, I'm incapable of forming a bond or feeling the horror. It was my responsibility."

"You were doing human experimentation." Booth said. "Using them without their consent, just like the Nazi's."

"Yes, the Nazi's. Also the Japanese, Russians, Americans. Modern knowledge of how the human body reacts to freezing comes almost exclusively from Dr. Rachers' experiments during World War II. The United States' data on biological warfare came from the pardoning of the Japanese physicians of Unit 731. Our own sweet U.S. Public Health Service ran their famous syphilis study in Tuskegee.

"They'll spend decades arguing about the ethicacy, but in the end they'll use the data. Because they are good people, who want to ease the suffering of their patients. I used my special talent to serve the world, Agent Booth. Hakim taught me; now there'll never be another Hakim."

It was a confession. The killer caught, justice eminent, but he couldn't stop. He couldn't. He couldn't.

"Why did you made the donations?"

"Solider's get their name carved into a wall, for their sacrifice. Do you think the children deserve anything less?"

A name carved in a wall, in exchange for all the things that were taken away. A future, a family, a life. Not fair for a child. Not fair for anyone. Booth felt that spread across his brain. He breathed in. Breathed out.

"Alexanders," he put his palms on the table, leaned closer. Alexanders looked towards him expectantly. Booth fixed the words, flung them as hard as he'd ever propelled a fixed bayonet. "They'll never use your data. Never.

"It's flawed. Total crap. The sample size is too small, the procedures sloppy, the results un-reproducible. There's no conclusion. No help. You tortured, and you killed, and _nothing _has come from it. You're name isn't going on a wall, David. It's not going down in the history books. It's dying with a needle in it's arm."

Across from him, Alexanders was suddenly breathing heavily. Chest heaving as his knuckles went white against the table edge. His face, no longer smooth was twisted into an animal snarl.

"No," he said, but his voice shook. His head jerked back and forth. "No!"

Booth took his hands off the table. Stood up. Walked across the room. He was gentle with the door, shutting it with a tiny click. When he looked up, Bones was standing in front of him.

He looked at her, and felt it all pressing down. Her rejection, and her acceptance. David Alexanders, and Luz Marquez, and October Hadley. Teddy Parker who he had tried to save, the nameless targets that he had killed. He felt them, and he didn't try to hide it from her.

"Booth," she said, holding her hand out to him. Her gaze didn't waver, and inside her eyes he could see oceans. He looked down at her hand. The distal, middle, and proximal phalanges. Attached to the metacarpals, then the carpals. The arm bones attached to the shoulder bones attached to the brain.

It might be years before she told him she loved him, but that didn't mean the condition didn't exist. Didn't mean she wouldn't show him. He took her hand.

"Are you okay?" She asked. There was a line working into her forehead. Akin to the worry line, but not one he had seen before. It was new, and it was for him. Her worry for a lover.

"Yeah, Bones," he squeezed the hand she had offered him, "I'm good."

It was true.

_FIN_

* * *

A/N: Here ends the story, imagine reader. My goal was to get it finished before the premier of season six. So, I'm only a year late. Thank you to anyone who gave this story a second chance, and to anyone who reviewed, or put this on their favorites list.

**Second Disclaimer:** I gave the bad guy Aspergers. Yup, I did. The show's creators have often hinted that Brennan is on the spectrum of autism, and the idea really caught my imagination. I wanted to explore the idea, so I created a story where lack of acceptance created a monster. I hope I did it with sensitivity, and not brutality. Absolutely no offense was intended.

**Where in the world? **38º 20' 14"N, 076º 26' 27"W


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